Recent Articleshttps://prospect.org/authors/126070/rss.xml
The American Prospect - articles by authoren2020 and the Democrats’ Theory of Changehttps://prospect.org/article/2020-and-democrats-theory-change
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed"> </div>
<div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_19075142989769_1.jpg?itok=JAoTl5TK" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Michael Nigro/Sipa via AP Images</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>On March 15, 2019, thousands of students from New York City—and around the world—walked out of class to protest the lack of action to protect the earth from catastrophic climate change. </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><em>This is a preview of the Spring issue of </em>The American Prospect <em>magazine. <a href="http://www.prospect.org/subscribe">Subscribe here</a>. </em></p>
<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>s Democrats prepare for 2020, they face a fundamental quandary. The theories of change offered by their most recent president, Barack Obama, and previous presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, have been shot to hell.</p>
<p>I borrow the phrase “theory of change” from an <a href="https://prospect.org/article/theory-change-primary">article</a> that Mark Schmitt wrote for the <em>Prospect </em>in December 2007 about the candidates who were vying for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Rather than being about ideology or electability, Schmitt wrote, the nomination fight that year was about differing assumptions about politics and how to use the “levers of power” to get things done. Schmitt suggested that Obama wasn’t so naïve as to believe in “hope” and “bipartisanship” but was instead using those aspirations as a “tactic” to subvert conservative power. By claiming “the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity,” Obama would seize the high ground, and “Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk.”</p>
<p>Even cleverly interpreted, however, the theory of change that Obama espoused as a candidate in 2008 has long ceased to be tenable. He did get important things done, notably the Recovery Act in the depths of the Great Recession, the Affordable Care Act, and financial reform—but none of them thanks to bipartisanship. Republicans refused to be partners in governing even in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Depression. The only reason Obama had significant legislative achievements is that for his first two years Democrats had control of Congress, including a filibuster-proof Senate majority for about six months, which is what enabled the ACA to pass.</p>
<p>As a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2008 and as the party’s candidate for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s theory of change relied on detailed preparation of serious and practical policy ideas. Her standard speech in the 2008 campaign, Schmitt pointed out, made use of a three-way contrast. One candidate, Clinton said, was relying on “hope” for change (that was Obama), while a second thought you could just “demand” change (that was John Edwards), but she insisted you have to “work for it.” The title of Clinton’s 2014 book <em>Hard Choices </em>expressed the same spirit, and her 2016 campaign site offered policy prescriptions in more than 30 different areas. From her long experience she could give a coherent response to the full gamut of international and domestic challenges, a quality that Americans once valued in a president.</p>
<p>In campaigns, however, more can sometimes be less. <span class="pullquote-right">Clinton’s many rational and sensible policies could not compete successfully for the voters’ attention with the few simple things that Donald Trump used to stir outrage and appeal to raw emotion. </span>Of course, Clinton wasn’t helped by the media’s preoccupation with her emails, the disinformation efforts during the campaign, and much else—and she did win nearly three million more votes than Trump. But there is a lesson nonetheless in her inability to convey a clear and strong message about what she would change as president and how she would do it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>IN LIGHT OF THIS</strong> recent history, it’s easy to understand why Democrats are fed up with bipartisan compromise and sensible pragmatism. There is no point in calling for bipartisanship if the other side is unwilling to compromise and sees no reason to do so because it has gotten away with being intransigent. In what may be the single most important development in American politics in the last half-century, the liberal and moderate Republicans who once were open to compromise have nearly vanished from the national stage. This is not as common in state government, where Democrats and Republicans sometimes do work together. As a result, some Democratic presidential candidates with state-level experience—Colorado’s governor John Hickenlooper is the current example—claim they can bring cooperation back to Washington. But in national politics these days, the advocates of bipartisanship are the true utopians.</p>
<p>So Democrats will almost certainly need to rely entirely on members of their own party to govern, but that won’t resolve the problem of how to bring about change. The Democratic Party itself is a coalition, and that coalition now includes people who used to be Republican moderates or independents, especially in the suburban areas where Democratic victories in 2018 gave them control of the House. If Democrats ignore that side of the party, they will not only lose the presidency in 2020—they’ll lose the House too. <a href="https://cookpolitical.com/analysis/house/house-overview/2020-house-overview-can-democrats-keep-their-majority">Democrats now hold 31 districts won by Trump in 2016</a>, while Republicans hold only three won by Clinton. <span class="pullquote-right">The extreme clustering of Democratic votes in cities puts the party at a structural disadvantage that they can overcome only by extending their support into traditionally Republican suburbs.</span> The need to win those relatively affluent districts, however, constrains how far to the left the party can move. No credible theory of progressive change today can ignore this reality.</p>
<p>The challenge for Democrats, furthermore, isn’t just to gain power but to keep it. The big changes that Democrats want to bring about will take a long time to see through. The last two Democratic presidents both lost control of Congress at the first midterm election. To break that pattern, Democrats need a strategy that can maintain and even expand their coalition instead of undercutting it.</p>
<p>There are legitimate disagreements about how to do that. Here’s my view.</p>
<p>To avoid the problems Clinton faced in 2016 in conveying a message about change, the Democrats need to focus on a few big ideas that embrace many of the specific policies they will be promising to pursue. Fortunately, they have already begun to develop those themes, though it will be critical how their presidential candidate in 2020 defines and explains them.</p>
<p>The first big theme brings together the most historically urgent issue of our time, climate change, with practical economic concerns about jobs and fairness. That’s the idea of a Green New Deal. Time is of the essence in climate reform. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/opinion/sunday/fear-panic-climate-change-warming.html">The longer the United States and other countries delay measures to reduce greenhouse gases, the steeper the reductions need to be</a> and the greater the risk of hitting irreversible tipping points and triggering truly catastrophic levels of warming and sea-level rise. This is one reason why a Trump presidency lasting until the mid-2020s would be so dangerous.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/opinion/green-new-deal-carbon-taxes.html?action=click&amp;module=Opinion&amp;pgtype=Homepage">a narrowly tailored climate policy—built, for example, around a carbon tax</a>—will not work. To succeed politically, a program has to provide voters with immediate and tangible benefits, and the way to do that is to frame climate reform as a program for rebuilding America, which, in fact, it necessarily must be. Trump promised an infrastructure program but has failed to deliver it; the Green New Deal can be that program, except now aimed at meeting both economic and urgent environmental goals. This shouldn’t be a Christmas tree hung with every progressive ornament, but it has to be socially inclusive, deliver increased earnings (for example, through a higher minimum wage), and attend to the legitimate worries of workers and communities, especially those threatened at least initially by the coming energy transition. Borrowing is a proper way to finance public investments that bring a future return, and that is principally what Democrats should rely on, without being intimidated by deficit scolds as they were in recent Democratic administrations.</p>
<p>A second big theme is family security, which could embrace a variety of specific ideas that Democrats are supporting. Several presidential candidates have endorsed a bill now in Congress, <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/6/18249290/child-poverty-american-family-act-sherrod-brown-michael-bennet">the American Family Act</a>, which proposes what in other countries are known as “child allowances.” The allowances would consist of refundable tax credits of $300 per month for children up to age five and $250 for children ages six to sixteen. An expansion of the existing Child Tax Credit (which does not, however, benefit the poor), the new system would cut child poverty by a third and bolster middle-income families, while being phased out at higher incomes.</p>
<p>Proposals for paid family leave and universal child care would also fit into what could be conceived of as a broader Family Security Act, aimed at helping young families get a start and providing a secure foundation for their—that is, for America’s—children. Democrats ought to finance these programs not only by repealing most of the unpopular 2017 Republican tax legislation but also through <a href="https://prospect.org/article/democrats-have-broken-taboo-about-raising-taxes-and-thats-good-thing">higher taxes on the superrich</a>, as in Elizabeth Warren’s proposed tax on households with net assets of more than $50 million.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>THE GREEN NEW DEAL</strong> and a family security program have two things in common. First, they are about securing the future, though each provides concrete benefits that voters will be able to see in the short term. Second, both the programs and the financing for them will express a sense of fairness and justice that Americans are asking for, without demanding higher taxes from those middle-class suburbanites who have just started voting Democratic.</p>
<p>Democrats will necessarily have to spell out positions on many other issues, such as immigration and trade, where the election is likely to be a referendum on Trump. At the same time, they need to stay away from some other causes that could undermine their chances to win in 2020 or to govern effectively thereafter. I have two things particularly in mind.</p>
<p>The first is reparations for the descendants of slaves, an issue that has had a flurry of publicity after some of the Democrats running for president said they were open to the idea. I have long believed there is justice in the idea of reparations; in a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1992/04/19/race-and-reparations/4d208f1a-ec8f-40cc-acc8-d8d738450a4f/?utm_term=.b2345ee0dedc">1992 article</a> I proposed reparations in the form of an “Endowment for Black America.” But it is one thing for writers to suggest ideas, another thing for candidates and parties to adopt them in a campaign. When an idea is not ripe—when, as in the case of reparations, <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-americans-think-about-reparations-and-other-race-related-questions/">an overwhelming majority of voters continue to reject it</a>—political leaders need to say no. They are not obliged by their ideals to make a gift of an election to the opposition.</p>
<p>Medicare for All, particularly in its single-payer version, would also be a political albatross. Again, I understand the abstract argument; I’ve proposed an alternative that I call <a href="https://prospect.org/article/new-strategy-health-care">“Midlife Medicare”</a> for making Medicare available at 50 for individuals not otherwise insured. But single-payer poses a host of difficulties: It would take away people’s existing insurance, arouse the all-out resistance of the entire health-care industry, and require tax increases of a magnitude with no precedent in U.S. history.</p>
<p>Current single-payer proposals imply raising taxes to pay for all the costs now covered through private insurance premiums and out-of-pocket spending. <a href="https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/cms-office-actuary-releases-2017-national-health-expenditures">In 2017, those came to $1.6 trillion</a>, just <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/216928/us-government-revenues-by-category/">about the same total as the government raised through the personal income tax</a>. Even if single-payer had big savings, the necessary tax increases are implausible and would likely sink the rest of the Democrats’ agenda. The rest of what Democrats hope to accomplish is simply too important to put at risk. On health care, their immediate aim should be to provide for early eligibility for Medicare, reforms of the ACA, and measures to reduce pharmaceutical and medical prices.</p>
<p>Large-scale institutional change is extraordinarily difficult in the United States. Our political institutions are set up to make it difficult, and the entrenched power of concentrated wealth makes it even harder. There has been no period in American history, not even the New Deal, when reformers did not make concessions to achieve the big changes that were consistent with sustained political power. If Democrats can carry out a Green New Deal and a family security program, it will be momentous, and it will build the support for other things as well. But if they cannot adjust their program and how they talk about it to fit the political coalition they have, they will get nowhere.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 21 Mar 2019 09:00:00 +0000232490 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrHere’s How the Democratic Presidential Nomination Will Gohttps://prospect.org/article/heres-how-democratic-presidential-nomination-will-go
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_16211156515526.jpg?itok=sXWNj4Ho" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">AP Photo/John Locher</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">S</span>ince the Democratic presidential nomination is wide open and will have more than a dozen serious candidates, it is foolhardy and premature to speculate about how the race will play out. So let’s be foolhardy and premature and do exactly that.</p>
<p>In the early polls—to which, of course, we should pay no attention whatsoever—Kamala Harris has broken out of the pack of new candidates and is running third, behind the two old guys with the widest name recognition, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, both of whose support may be soft.</p>
<p>That trio does make a certain degree of sense in terms of the party’s make-up. As an African American and child of immigrants (from Jamaica and India), Harris may win particularly strong support from people of color. Sanders’s biggest appeal is to white progressives and others who want to shake up the status quo, while Biden is the candidate of continuity, moderation, and familiarity, though he hasn’t yet said whether he’s running.</p>
<p>Leaping ahead, let’s say that three principal candidates emerge from the early primaries and that Harris is one of them, especially because California and the southern states vote in early March, which should give her a boost (assuming Stacey Abrams stays out of the race).</p>
<p>Sanders may have to duke it out with Elizabeth Warren because they appeal to many of the same voters. Both will also be expected to do well in New Hampshire, which has often given an edge to candidates from neighboring states. A recent <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/nbc-news-wsj-poll-2020-race-will-be-uphill-trump-n978331">national NBC-<em>Wall Street Journal</em> poll</a> found that being a “socialist” and “over 75” were the two characteristics respondents identified a<em>s least </em>desirable in a presidential candidate. But Sanders has a devoted core following, which may be larger than Warren’s. So let’s suppose Sanders wins the battle in New Hampshire and other early states, forcing Warren to suspend her campaign. (I’ll come back to the opposite possibility later on.)</p>
<p>Let’s call the third main surviving candidate from the early primaries Candidate B. That could be Biden, or Beto, or Booker, or Brown, or even a candidate whose name somehow doesn’t begin with B like KloBuchar. Candidate B is by no means a conservative but is perceived as more moderate than Sanders or Harris. (If Candidate B is Sherrod Brown, that may not be true.) There could even be more than one Candidate B if a candidate who is running fourth or fifth decides to stay in the race because none of the top three is winning a majority of delegates.</p>
<p>Here the nomination rules used by the Democrats become important. Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats don’t have any winner-take-all-primaries; delegates are allocated proportionally to votes, except that candidates who receive less than 15 percent of the vote get no delegates. The 15-percent threshold will knock out many poorly performing candidates, but the proportionality rule opens up the possibility of a contested convention in a fragmented field with no single dominant figure.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">A contested convention is also more likely because of the new rules about superdelegates, who are barred from voting on the first ballot, though they can vote on later ones. </span>As a result, the superdelegates can no longer give a first-ballot victory to a candidate who comes out of the primaries just short of a majority with pledged delegates alone. </p>
<p>So let’s now imagine what happens in our three-way race if Harris, Sanders, and Candidate B emerge as the leaders from the primaries, but none has a majority, which forces the convention to go to a second ballot.</p>
<p>If any one of these candidates is close to a majority, the superdelegates voting on the second ballot may decide the nomination. Indeed, it might be hard for the superdelegates to deny the nomination to a candidate who has won a plurality of the votes and has a significant lead in delegates over the others (this is most likely how Sanders could emerge as the nominee). If, however, the top candidates are bunched closely together and the superdelegates give the nomination to Harris or Candidate B, Sanders and his supporters may claim the party has cheated him a second time and the outcome is illegitimate—a nightmare for Democrats, who want to go into the general election united. </p>
<p>But let’s now assume the superdelegates are not enough for Candidate B, Harris, or Sanders to win the nomination, and consequently potential deals among the candidates come into play. At this point if not earlier, a dark-horse fourth candidate could become a kingmaker. But if bargaining among the top three candidates is decisive, Harris likely becomes the pivotal player because Candidate B and Sanders are probably ideologically incompatible. In addition, while Sanders could offer Harris the vice presidency, Sanders accepting the vice presidency on a Harris ticket seems implausible. So a deal between Harris and Candidate B is far more likely, with the question of who takes the top spot depending partly on their relative position in the delegate count. </p>
<p>If you've followed me so far, the most likely outcome has Harris on the ticket, one way or another.</p>
<p>We can also imagine a variety of possibilities here depending on who Candidate B is. If B is Biden and he is ahead, Harris may agree to be his vice president; if Biden is behind, he may just throw his support to Harris and step aside to stop Sanders, whereas if Candidate B is Beto or Brown and also lagging in the delegate count, he may agree to be vice president. (As far as the Democratic Party has come, a ticket with both Harris and Booker, or even both Harris and another woman, seems unlikely—a factor that constrains possible combinations.)</p>
<p>What if Warren prevails over Sanders in the early going and is the alternative to Harris and Candidate B? in that case, the bargaining at the convention could go a different way because Warren and Candidate B might be able to forge an alliance. A Biden-Warren ticket, for example, is not as implausible as a ticket with both Biden and Sanders (which, among other things, would undoubtedly set a record for combined age).</p>
<p>Yes, you’re right, it’s way too early to engage in this kind of speculation. I should be using my time and yours more productively—don’t we all have more urgent things to do? Besides, it’s not as if the future of the world depended on the Democratic nomination. </p>
<p>Oh, wait … it does.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 06 Mar 2019 10:00:00 +0000232393 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrThis Baby Is Overduehttps://prospect.org/article/baby-overdue
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_19050319808304.jpg?itok=8VSkVqRf" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Ronen Tivony/Sipa via AP Images</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Senator Elizabeth Warren speaks at a campaign rally in Glendale, California. </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p></p><div class="media media-element-container media-default media-float-right"><div id="file-40036" class="file file-image file-image-jpeg">
<h2 class="element-invisible"><a href="/file/agenda2020jpg">agenda_2020.jpg</a></h2>
<div class="content">
<img height="231" width="227" style="height: 111px; width: 109px; margin: 10px; float: right;" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/agenda_2020.jpg" alt="" /></div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen Senator Elizabeth Warren issued a bold plan for universal child care earlier this week, the question some people asked was the usual one: How will she pay for it? Warren has a good answer to that question, which I’ll come to.</p>
<p>But there’s a second question that is actually more difficult: How will child care get the necessary public and media attention to make it a top priority?</p>
<p>In 2016, Hillary Clinton issued a proposal for universal access to child care that was similar to Warren’s, though not as extensive. Clinton called for federal subsidies to cap child care costs at 10 percent of family income, whereas Warren proposes to cap those costs at 7 percent. Like Warren today, Clinton wanted to build on existing locally run programs such as Head Start to make child care affordable for all families. And like Warren, Clinton also framed the program as serving the purposes of both economic growth and family well-being, as Katie Hamm and Sarah Jane Glynn of the Center for American Progress explained in a fall 2016 <em>American Prospect </em>article, “<a href="https://prospect.org/article/putting-family-policy-governing-agenda">Putting Family Policy on the Governing Agenda.”</a></p>
<p><a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/153131/glaring-hole-elizabeth-warrens-childcare-plan">Some people writing this week</a> about Warren’s proposal seem to have forgotten or to be unaware that the last Democratic presidential candidate wanted to move in the same direction. But if you never heard about that Clinton child-care proposal, it’s hardly your fault. Media coverage of all substantive policy issues was astonishingly limited in the 2016 presidential race. In <a href="https://www.cjr.org/analysis/fake-news-media-election-trump.php">a study in the <em>Columbia Journalism Review</em></a>, Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild found that in just the six days after FBI Director James Comey announced the reopening of the agency’s email inquiry, <em>The </em><em>New York Times</em>published as many cover stories about Clinton’s emails as it had published about <em>all policy issues combined </em>in the two months before the election.</p>
<p>The analog to coverage of Clinton’s emails may be coverage about Warren’s Native American ancestry. Still, the chances may be better this time for putting work-family issues at the center of public debate. The midterms saw an upsurge of political activism among women and a record number of women elected to Congress, and the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has not just one woman in the running but at least four who are in the top tier of candidates.</p>
<p>That’s not to say child care is exclusively a “women’s issue,” just that women in the public arena are more likely to make an issue of it. The changes in gender politics over the past several years could help elevate child care to the prominence it deserves. Let all the candidates, not just Warren, come up with proposals and debate child care the way Democratic candidates in recent elections have debated health-care reform. </p>
<p>Back to the financing: In a column on <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/opinion/on-paying-for-a-progressive-agenda.html?action=click&amp;module=Opinion&amp;pgtype=Homepage">paying for a progressive agenda</a>, Paul Krugman makes a useful distinction among three types of expenditures: investments that can be paid for through borrowing because they generate an economic return; benefit enhancements that can be paid for through higher taxes on the rich; and major system overhauls that involve such drastic changes in taxes and social arrangements that Democrats would be wise to put them off. </p>
<p>As an example of a major system overall, Krugman points to pure Medicare for All proposals that would replace employer-sponsored coverage with tax-financed public insurance. As he says in an understatement, that would be “a much heavier political lift” than the other two types of expenditures: “You don’t have to be a neoliberal tool to wonder whether major system overhaul should be part of the Democratic platform right now.”</p>
<p>That’s exactly <a href="https://prospect.org/article/pleasant-illusions-medicare-all-debate">my view of Medicare for All proposals</a>, but that is not tantamount to saying Democrats should refrain from ambitious ideas. On the contrary, those other ambitious ideas—like universal child care—wouldn’t have a chance if Medicare for All, with its staggering fiscal demands, dominates Democratic priorities. As Krugman argues, Democrats have options that are both good policy and good politics for financing both big investments (such as many of the Green New Deal ideas) and benefit enhancements (such as universal child care). Those are the ideas that should be at the top of their agenda for 2020.</p>
<p>Warren calls for financing her Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act with the proceeds from the wealth tax that she proposed earlier—a tax of 2 percent on net worth for people with more than $50 million in assets and an additional 1 percent for those with more than $1 billion in assets. <span class="pullquote-right">Public opinion surveys have shown strong support for the general idea of higher taxes on the rich and in particular for Warren’s wealth tax.</span> I have <a href="https://prospect.org/article/democrats-have-broken-taboo-about-raising-taxes-and-thats-good-thing">some concerns about the wealth tax</a> because of its vulnerability to a challenge in the Supreme Court, given the Court’s current right-wing majority. But I believe its aims could be achieved through changes in the income and estate taxes, where the legal foundations are firm.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.economy.com/mark-zandi/documents/2019-02-18-Child-Care-Act.pdf">an economic analysis of Warren’s proposal</a>, Mark Zandi and Sophia Koropeckyj of Moody’s Analytics find that the wealth tax would more than cover the cost of the child care plan, which they put at $70 billion annually, when taking into account its first-order economic effects in stimulating consumer spending and increasing labor participation. There are also longer-term benefits from improvements in early childhood learning; to use Krugman’s categories, the child-care proposal is both an investment and a benefit enhancement. </p>
<p>Of course, there’s a lot more that would need to be done to resolve the problems in child care. Warren’s proposal aims to improve the pay of child-care workers and the quality of child-care services, but it would take time and government involvement to build out the capacity to provide that high-quality care on a fully universal basis. An <a href="https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/projects/family-fun-pack/">alternative approach presented last week by Matt Breunig</a> calls for more direct government involvement on the supply side and free access to child care (under Warren’s proposal only families with incomes below twice the poverty level would get child care at no charge). Curiously enough, coming from the left, <a href="https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/02/20/notes-on-elizabeth-warrens-child-care-proposal/">Breunig also criticizes Warren’s proposal</a> for not including payments to parents who care for their children at home and for lacking adequate cost controls (and he may well be right about that). </p>
<p>These are exactly the kind of questions that ought to be front and center in the national debate on child care policy as the 2020 campaign unfolds. It’s time American politics gave young families the attention and help with child-care costs they need. This baby is long overdue.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 21 Feb 2019 14:29:58 +0000232210 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrDemocrats Have Broken the Taboo about Raising Taxes, and That’s a Good Thinghttps://prospect.org/article/democrats-have-broken-taboo-about-raising-taxes-and-thats-good-thing
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_19006047306749.jpg?itok=7lIoSXtm" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Matthew Putney, File</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Senator Elizabeth Warren speaks during an organizing event at Curate event space in Des Moines, Iowa. </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">C</span>andidates generally avoid talking about new taxes without tying them closely to new programs, and even then they mostly emphasize how limited the taxes will be. But this year three of the Democratic Party’s leading progressives have called for substantial new taxes on the rich. Senator Elizabeth Warren has put a new wealth tax at the center of her presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders has advocated an increase in the estate tax, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has proposed nearly doubling the top income tax rate to 70 percent.</p>
<p>Those proposals have not only broken a taboo but shown that higher taxes on the rich are popular. A <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/04/democrats-taxes-economy-policy-2020-1144874"><em>Politico</em>/Morning Consult poll</a> found 76 percent of registered voters generally in support of raising taxes on the rich and 61 percent specifically in support of Warren’s wealth tax. The numbers on Ocasio-Cortes’s proposal weren’t as strong but still positive—45 percent for, 32 percent against. Other surveys, even one by Fox News, have also found that Americans believe the rich should pay more.</p>
<p>The key feature of the progressive tax proposals, which helps explain their popularity, is that they focus exclusively on the rich. <a href="https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senator-warren-unveils-proposal-to-tax-wealth-of-ultra-rich-americans">Warren’s wealth tax</a> would apply only to households with more than $50 million in net worth—the top .1 percent. While Sanders would raise estate taxes, he would still leave the first $3.5 million tax-free. Ocasio-Cortes’s top income tax rate would apply only to incomes over $10 million.</p>
<p>In a political party whose base includes college-educated professionals, there’s a clear political logic to these proposals. Democrats would find it hard to support taxes that heavily burden middle or upper-middle-income groups. But taxing income and wealth at the top is a different story.</p>
<p>You can see that political logic at work in the tax increases proposed in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/us/politics/social-security-2100-act.html">Social Security legislation that Democrats recently introduced in Congress</a>. As of this year, the Social Security tax of 12.4 percent applies to earnings up to $132,900, an amount that is annually adjusted for inflation. Under the proposed Social Security 2100 Act—which would increase benefits and put the program on a firm foundation for the rest of the century—the tax rate would rise over the next 24 years to 14.8 percent.</p>
<p>But, for the first time, that tax would also apply to earnings over $400,000 a year. In other words, while increasing taxes on top earners—indeed, increasing those taxes substantially—the legislation would create an untaxed “donut hole” for earnings between $132,900 and $400,000. </p>
<p>I have my doubts about the Social Security 2100 Act, mainly because I’d like to see some of that revenue used for other priorities such as child care, Medicare expansion, and affordable housing. (For another approach to long-term Social Security reform, see Henry Aaron, <a href="https://prospect.org/article/how-keep-social-security-secure">“How to Keep Social Security Secure.”)</a> But the donut hole makes political sense.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">If Democrats win the presidency and Congress in 2020, they’re going to need sources of new revenue to take major new initiatives. </span>This time around, Democrats are less likely to be constrained by concerns about balanced budgets than they were under Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. They don’t want to be put in the position of just cleaning up the mess left by Republicans, and they have a far better case for deficit financing of infrastructure and investments in human capital than Republicans did with their 2017 tax bill. But more generous social programs will require new taxes. Reversing the 2017 Republican tax giveaways to corporations and raising taxes on top incomes are the best ways of raising that revenue for the policies they campaign on in 2020.</p>
<p>Still, there are major policy and strategic questions about which of the progressive taxes to pursue. Warren’s wealth tax—2 percent annually on net worth above $50 million and an additional 1 percent on net worth above $1 billion—has the merit of being well targeted at the superrich, the class that has seen its wealth grow spectacularly while most families’ wealth has stagnated. It would help counteract the tendencies toward oligarchy in American society and politics.</p>
<p>But the wealth tax presents two kinds of problems that suggest Democrats might need to rely on the established federal taxes to raise revenue on a progressive basis. According to a traditional adage of public finance, “An old tax is a good tax.” A tax long in effect has well-established administrative mechanisms and legal foundations. That is the case for the income and estate taxes. The United States has successfully enforced both of them at high levels, and their constitutional grounding is secure. But neither of those things are true of a wealth tax.</p>
<p>Many countries have had difficulties carrying out wealth taxes, as a <a href="http://www.etudes-fiscales-internationales.com/media/01/01/2671881366.pdf">recent report</a> from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development explains in detail. In 1990, 12 OECD countries had net wealth taxes, but by 2017 that number was down to four, and one of those (France) has since eliminated its wealth tax. “Decisions to repeal net wealth taxes,” the report observes, “have often been justified by efficiency and administrative concerns and by the observation that net wealth taxes have frequently failed to meet their redistributive goals. The revenues collected from net wealth taxes have also, with a few exceptions, been very low.”</p>
<p>Warren’s wealth tax is designed to meet these objections, and the economists consulted by Warren, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, project that tax avoidance and evasion can be kept to a modest level. But they may be underestimating the ingenuity of the lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists who make up the wealth-defense industry. </p>
<p>Still, the administrative problems don’t seem to me dispositive; a wealth tax might be worth enacting even if its enforcement was incomplete. The more serious problem is the potential for a wealth tax to be overturned by the Supreme Court. In a recent law review article, Dawn Johnsen and Walter Dellinger make a compelling case for the <a href="https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol93/iss1/8/">constitutionality of a national wealth tax</a>. Their view would almost certainly prevail if the Court did not have a far-right majority, but because it does, the Court might well strike it down.</p>
<p>So, if you’re in Congress and you agree that higher taxes on the rich are justified, do you vote for a wealth tax that might be overturned? Or do you work within the framework of the income and estate taxes to achieve the same purpose? It seems to me the answer is clear.</p>
<p>In the future, Democrats could come back to a wealth tax when liberals have a majority on the Court. They should try to avoid enacting that tax at a point when a conservative majority might establish a historic precedent against it.</p>
<p>In the long run, a generous system of social protection cannot be fully financed with taxes on the rich, especially if those taxes are successful in reducing extreme inequalities. The more egalitarian countries with extensive and stable welfare states rely on broad-based taxes, particularly value-added taxes, and eventually the United States will need to adopt a mechanism of that kind too. That, however, is an even bigger taboo. For now, it’s a good thing Democrats are talking about higher taxes on the rich. </p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 14 Feb 2019 15:23:25 +0000232155 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrThe Pleasant Illusions of the Medicare-for-All Debate https://prospect.org/article/pleasant-illusions-medicare-all-debate
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_17256717970454_0.jpg?itok=f3UrD6gi" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Andrew Harnik</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Senator Bernie Sanders, accompanied by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, speaks at a news conference on Capitol Hill to unveil their Medicare for All legislation. </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">S</span>ince campaigns for public, tax-financed health insurance began just over a century ago, they have followed a pattern. During the early phase, the advocates of transformative change are convinced that they have a winning cause, only to find out as the battle develops that they have less support and face more intense opposition than they expected.</p>
<p>Crushing defeat was the fate of the health insurance campaigns during the Progressive era and again under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. It was only when reformers retreated to a more limited program for seniors that Medicare passed in 1965, with Medicaid added almost as an afterthought.</p>
<p>The cycle was repeated in the late 20th century. Campaigns for national health insurance in the late 1960s and early 1970s and under Bill Clinton in the 1990s began amid a widespread conviction that Congress would pass a national program. But it was only when reformers retreated to a more limited measure under Barack Obama that the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010.</p>
<p>Now, the cycle is under way again as many people on the left believe that the moment has finally arrived for what has been rebranded as “single payer” or “Medicare for all.”</p>
<p>I’ve spent a good deal of my life writing about the history of health care and health policy and working for universal coverage, including the time I spent in the Clinton White House on it. I agree that at this point we ought to expand Medicare’s framework for health insurance, which works better than the ACA’s. But we also need to appreciate why the more aggressive proposals to expand Medicare are going to meet intense and likely devastating opposition.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Medicare-for-all can mean one of four substantially different alternatives, each with many variations. </span>The Medicare program today consists of both a public Medicare plan and private “Medicare Advantage” plans. (One-third of Medicare beneficiaries choose a private plan.) So the first difference among Medicare-for-all proposals is whether they extend the public Medicare plan alone (“single payer”) or the Medicare program as a whole, including Medicare Advantage. </p>
<p>In addition, Medicare-for-all may mean making Medicare the exclusive framework for health insurance in the United States or making it available as an option to all who want to buy it (which could include employers as well as individuals who buy insurance on their own).</p>
<p>The table below shows these four alternative interpretations of Medicare for all.</p>
<p></p><div class="media media-element-container media-default"><div id="file-39902" class="file file-image file-image-png">
<h2 class="element-invisible"><a href="/file/screenshot2019-02-06at42248pmpng">screen_shot_2019-02-06_at_4.22.48_pm.png</a></h2>
<div class="content">
<img height="262" width="1052" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/screen_shot_2019-02-06_at_4.22.48_pm.png" alt="" /></div>
</div>
</div>
<p>These four different proposals vary in their political as well as policy implications. Single-payer would make three big changes that would be guaranteed to generate massive opposition:</p>
<ul><li>It would eliminate not only the private, employer-sponsored plans that cover a majority of Americans, but also the private plans within Medicare. If you like your insurance now, you will surely not be able to keep it.</li>
<li>It would require that taxes be raised to replace the funds now raised through insurance premiums as well as nearly all out-of-pocket spending (at least in the version Senator Bernie Sanders has called for). To give a rough idea of the magnitudes involved, insurance premiums and out-of-pocket spending in 2017 amounted to $1.6 trillion, just about the same total as the personal income tax raised. So, even allowing for big savings, imagine raising even three-quarters of that in new taxes.</li>
<li>It would subject all providers to Medicare payment rates, radically reducing revenues to health-care providers, many of which receive payment from the privately insured at much higher levels. Members of Congress could count on hearing from health-care leaders about the local hospital that will close, the cancer center that won’t be built, and the layoffs that will follow. And not all of this will be untrue.</li>
</ul><p>The other Medicare-for-all alternatives would also generate intense opposition, though not as much as single-payer. A universalized Medicare program—number 2 above—would allow for private insurance options, but it would still disrupt existing employer-based coverage, require more or less the same tax increases, and sharply cut payment rates (although with somewhat more flexibility).</p>
<p>The two Medicare-available-to-all alternatives answer concerns about taking away people’s existing coverage. But, depending on the way the proposals are designed, they could also produce a problem known as “adverse selection” for the Medicare program. Medicare would become more expensive because of who enrolled. For example, the employers that opted into Medicare would likely be the ones with the oldest workers and highest health-care costs. </p>
<p>Much of the discussion about Medicare-for-all proceeds on the assumption that the opposition would come mainly from private insurers. But this grossly underestimates the likely opposition from a fully mobilized health care industry (representing nearly a fifth of the economy) and the protected public, including current Medicare beneficiaries. Seniors are the age group most consistently opposed to Medicare-for-all; many of them fear that in a program for the entire population, they would lose their privileged position.</p>
<p>Then there’s also the likely opposition of Democrats, including many progressives, who would be worried that the huge fiscal demands of Medicare-for-all will preclude raising revenue for all the other good causes they support.</p>
<p>Medicare-for-all does have one great advantage: The term is vague enough so that Democratic leaders who say they support it can downshift to more moderate versions of the idea. They can say that the purer Medicare-for-all alternatives are “aspirational” and that they support many different bills. When cost estimates start coming in and they see the implications for the rest of their agenda, they can downshift still further on the grounds that transitional steps are needed.</p>
<p>This is predictable. Please don’t be crushed when your favorite Democratic presidential candidate or the eventual nominee makes these adjustments. Democrats can do a lot of good by delivering Medicare-for-more without sacrificing everything else they believe in for the sake of Medicare-for-all.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 07 Feb 2019 10:00:00 +0000232095 at https://prospect.orgPaul Starr5 Reasons Why MAGA Conservatism Has Never Made Any Sensehttps://prospect.org/article/5-reasons-why-maga-conservatism-has-never-made-any-sense
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/shutterstock_735101602.jpg?itok=gBtQzxfh" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">John M. Chase/Shutterstock</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Trump supporters in Washington, D.C.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">M</span>AGA hats have become a symbol of support not just for Donald Trump but for a return to a lost world of white privilege. In the slogan “Make America Great Again,” the operative word is “again.” The slogan points vaguely to a time in the past when things were “great,” when white men were free to push black people, women, and immigrants around. </p>
<p>But, for the sake of argument, let’s admit the possibility of a more generous interpretation. In the wake of the Great Depression, many Americans during the mid-20th century—white Americans chiefly—experienced greater social mobility and economic security than at any time since. In the generous interpretation, “Make America Great Again” could mean let’s rebuild an America with that high level of opportunity and security. On its face, it could even mean let’s create those conditions for all Americans today.</p>
<p>But that generous view runs into a problem. The kinds of policies Trump and his party favor won’t bring back those conditions even for whites who are voting Republican, much less for everyone. </p>
<p>Here are five reasons why make-America-great conservatism has never made any sense <em>on its own terms</em>.</p>
<p>1. <em>If we want to make America great, we need an updated understanding of the economy</em>. The jobs of the future aren’t going to come from industries that belong to a fading past. Trump’s promises to revive coal and protect steel reflect an image of the economy and sources of employment that comes from a half-century ago. Coal is in the midst of an inexorable decline because of technological change, quite apart from environmental regulation; slapping tariffs on imported steel raises the price of inputs for other manufacturers and makes their goods less competitive. As the minor modifications Trump negotiated in NAFTA show, he was never going to reverse America’s interdependent trade relationships and bring significant numbers of high-paying jobs back that way. All the false hopes he has aroused have mainly served as cover for the one major economic policy the Republicans have passed—the 2017 tax legislation, with its giveaways to the rich. </p>
<p>2. <em>If we want to make America great, we need to avoid a declining and aging population. </em>Child-bearing in the United States has fallen below the replacement rate; in 26 states, there are more deaths than births among the white population. In that light, you’d think conservatives would recognize the need for policies to reduce the costs to families of raising children. That would mean providing public support for child care and paid family leave; it would mean help for families with housing costs and college costs. But since Republicans want to leave those things to the market, they have nothing to offer young families and no answers to the risk that America will enter a period of demographically driven national decline. Their opposition to immigration compounds the danger. Deporting millions of undocumented here would create an immediate economic crisis; businesses would go bust, and whole towns would die off. The higher birth rate among immigrants is a blessing; it helps counteract the falling birth rate of the native born. <span class="pullquote-right">MAGA supporters ought to recognize that they will need enough workers to pay into Social Security while they’re collecting it</span>. So if for no other reason they should favor immigration reforms that legalize the status of the undocumented who have long been here and that welcome immigrants in the future.</p>
<p>3. <em>If we want to make America great, we need to support science and the universities, not undermine them</em>. The conservative antagonism to knowledge-producing institutions makes no sense from the standpoint even of people who will never set foot in them. There is no economic alternative to investing in advanced research and education. That’s true not only for the familiar reason: new knowledge will be the basis for future growth. It’s true also because new knowledge is needed to regulate emerging technologies in the public interest. We are entering a dangerous era with the advances in artificial intelligence, big data, and other fields. Trump’s backward-looking conservatism has nothing to say on those subjects.</p>
<p>4. <em>If we want to make America great, we have to face up to environmental realities. </em>Denying climate change won’t stop it from happening, but it is blocking us from making necessary adjustments in our way of life and necessary investments to limit global warming and prepare for changes that can no longer be averted. If the Republican Party wasn’t so deeply tied to the fossil-fuel industry, perhaps it could free itself to confront the challenges posed by rising temperatures and rising sea levels. But precisely because the party is beholden to those interests, it is incapable of making America both green and great—the only way America's future can be great. </p>
<p>5. <em>If we want to make America great, we need partners in the rest of the world. </em>MAGA conservatism is not only backward-looking but inward-looking. It assumes that the United States was once great because it could push other countries around. But the real greatness came from alliances and cooperation. Globalism isn’t a conspiracy; it’s a necessity in a world with highly integrated economies, facing climate change, and trying to contain the risks from nuclear weapons and terrorism. </p>
<p>If liberals and progressives wanted to, they could make a much more persuasive case that their policies would “make America great again.” But the overtones of that slogan are ugly. “Greatness” is not as great as justice. Justice is greater than "just us." Those MAGA hats belong in a museum as a reminder to future generations of how many Americans in the early 21st century were unable to cope with change and struck out blindly against it. The next America has to find a path to national renewal that lives up to what is best in our traditions. </p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 31 Jan 2019 10:00:00 +0000232038 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrRace and Class Are Old Bases of Political Divisions. Gender is Different.https://prospect.org/article/race-and-class-are-old-bases-political-divisions-gender-different
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_18267656070162.jpg?itok=Eg3h0L1S" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Demonstrators protest against Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court in Washington. </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he other day <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/245789/record-numbers-americans-leave.aspx?utm_source=alert&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=morelink&amp;utm_campaign=syndication">Gallup released some striking survey data</a> on migration. No, it wasn’t about how many people want to come to America. It was about the rising proportion of Americans who say they want to leave the country, up to 16 percent under Donald Trump from 10-11 percent under his two predecessors. One finding jumped out: 40 percent of women under 30, twice the proportion of men their age, say they’d leave America if they could.</p>
<p>I’m not expecting a mass exodus of young women, but the Gallup report was one more sign of the depth of their alienation from America in the age of Trump. This didn’t happen overnight; women’s anger about both politics and everyday culture in America has been building for a while. Until the past few years, however, it didn’t seem as though national politics would be fought out on the battleground of sex.</p>
<p>In the debate on the left about the social basis of American politics, the chief focus has long been on the relative importance and interconnection of race and class. Each of those has deep historical roots as a primary determinant of both social conflict and party alignments. Sex is different. At least in electoral politics, it is a relatively recent axis of partisan divisions. The major parties didn’t used to be identified with one sex or the other, much less with the acceptance or rejection of a variety of fluid gender identities.</p>
<p>Women during the post-World War II decades generally voted the same as men, or somewhat more Republican. A significant gender gap in voting began showing up in the 1980s, but that gap emerged only because men became more Republican, not because women became more Democratic. </p>
<p>That’s all changed since then, especially now that Democrats have experienced a surge of support from women.</p>
<p>In the 2018 election, according to a <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-2018-gender-gap-was-huge/">FiveThirtyEight analysis of exit polls</a>, 59 percent of women voted Democratic, 40 percent Republican—a 19 percent edge for Democrats that was double the difference in 2016. Since men gave a four-point edge to Republicans in 2018 (down 8 points from 2016), that’s a total gender gap of 23 points—a record, though only one-point higher than in 2016 since men as well as women moved toward the Democrats.</p>
<p>The continuing differences by sex are clearly connected to race and class. Overall, white women were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans in 2018; the Democratic edge comes entirely from women of color. The split among white women, however, is the result of two drastically different patterns: non-college-educated white women voted Republican by 14 points, while the college-educated voted Democratic by 20 points (59 percent to 39 percent). </p>
<p>The movement of college-educated women to the left shows up dramatically in data on the political views of college freshmen. When <a href="https://www.heri.ucla.edu/briefs/TFS-Brief-Report-2016.pdf">the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute</a> began its national survey of freshman in the 1970s, men were more likely than women to self-identify as “liberal” or “far left.” Now it’s the reverse: 41 percent of women describe themselves as “liberal” or “far left,” compared to 29 percent of the men.</p>
<p>Conservative pundits may ascribe the ideas of college-educated women to their liberal professors (and as a professor, I certainly hope they get <em>some </em>ideas that way). But the UCLA survey reports the views of students in their first year, when they have just arrived on campus. Even at that point in life, among the social stratum going on to college, women have moved to the left and men to the right since the 1970s. </p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">The 2016 election and subsequent developments, such as the #metoo movement and the confirmation hearing of Brett Kavanaugh, have put misogyny in the spotlight more than ever before.</span> But for an explanation of the historical shift that lies behind those events, we have to go back to the enormous—but incomplete—upheaval that’s taken place in gender relations and the economy since the 1970s. (The new Ruth Bader Ginsburg bioepic, <em>On the Basis of Sex</em>, is a great reminder of the magnitude of those changes and how they came about.)</p>
<p>Here the idea of a “stalled revolution” that Arlie Hochschild laid out in her 1989 book <em>The Second Shift </em>seems to me particularly helpful. Revisiting that book in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2014/08/06/the-second-shift-at-25-q-a-with-arlie-hochschild/?utm_term=.5512befe065d">a 2014 interview</a>, Hochschild explained it this way:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">Women have gone into the workforce, that was the revolution, but the workplace they go into and the men they come home to have changed less rapidly, or not at all. Nor has the government that could give them policies that would ease the way, like paid parental leave, paid family medical leave, or subsidized child care…. So what you’ve got are three sources of stall. What’s happening to men. What’s happening to the workplace and missing government help.</p>
<p>In national politics, it’s not just that the changes have stalled. The Republican Party has stalled them. It has become the vehicle and symbol of intransigent traditionalism. When the party chose Trump as its presidential nominee, it heightened the polarization of sexual politics in the first election with a woman as a major-party candidate. The revolution in women’s roles set off a backlash, and Republicans have taken advantage of it, just as they have become the party of racial backlash. The shift of women away from the Republicans is the backlash against the backlash.</p>
<p>I’m not saying Democrats personally or politically are innocent bystanders in the stall. But as things have worked out, while the Democrats have opened themselves to change, the Republicans have identified themselves with reactionary impulses. They know that the entry of women into the workforce and public life is irreversible, but they are refusing to recognize the changes in culture and public policy that have to follow.</p>
<p>If I believed that progress was always inevitable, it would be easy to say that Republicans are on the wrong side of history. But entrenched power doesn’t always yield. I do think, however, that the party that pledges to “make America great again” has worked itself into a position that’s a recipe for American decline.</p>
<p>The United States is experiencing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/us/fertility-rate-decline-united-states.html">a precipitous drop in the birth rate</a>. A decade ago American women were averaging about 2.1 children, which would keep the population steady, but the rate has fallen to about 1.78. Immigration would be one way of avoiding the kind of demographic and economic problems Japan is experiencing, but Republicans want to restrict the number of immigrants, legal and illegal. Reducing the costs of raising children would help boost the birth rate. That would mean supporting an array of policies that benefit young families: paid parental leave, subsidized child care and health care, housing assistance, and college tuition aid. But Republicans want to leave everything to the marketplace. Not only do they have nothing to offer the young women who are especially feeling the stresses of the stalled revolution; they also have no long-term way of ensuring a vital and prosperous society for the future.</p>
<p>Under the circumstances, I don’t think it’s surprising that so many young women would tell Gallup they’d rather live somewhere else. The only way forward for America is to finish the stalled revolution by overcoming the entrenched forces opposed to changes the country needs to make.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 24 Jan 2019 16:08:34 +0000231957 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrHow Gender Became Our National Political Battlegroundhttps://prospect.org/article/how-gender-became-our-national-political-battleground
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_18267656070162.jpg?itok=Eg3h0L1S" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Demonstrators protest against Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court in Washington. </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he other day <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/245789/record-numbers-americans-leave.aspx?utm_source=alert&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=morelink&amp;utm_campaign=syndication">Gallup released some striking survey data</a> on migration. No, it wasn’t about how many people want to come to America. It was about the rising proportion of Americans who say they want to leave the country, up to 16 percent under Donald Trump from 10-11 percent under his two predecessors. One finding jumped out: 40 percent of women under 30, twice the proportion of men their age, say they’d leave America if they could.</p>
<p>I’m not expecting a mass exodus of young women, but the Gallup report was one more sign of the depth of their alienation from America in the age of Trump. This didn’t happen overnight; women’s anger about both politics and everyday culture in America has been building for a while. Until the past few years, however, it didn’t seem as though national politics would be fought out on the battleground of sex.</p>
<p>In the debate on the left about the social basis of American politics, the chief focus has long been on the relative importance and interconnection of race and class. Each of those has deep historical roots as a primary determinant of both social conflict and party alignments. Gender is different. At least in electoral politics, it is a relatively recent axis of partisan divisions. The major parties didn’t used to be identified with one sex or the other, much less with the acceptance or rejection of a variety of fluid gender identities.</p>
<p>Women during the post-World War II decades generally voted the same as men, or somewhat more Republican. A significant gender gap in voting began showing up in the 1980s, but that gap emerged only because men became more Republican, not because women became more Democratic. </p>
<p>That’s all changed since then, especially now that Democrats have experienced a surge of support from women.</p>
<p>In the 2018 election, according to a <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-2018-gender-gap-was-huge/"><em>FiveThirtyEight</em> analysis of exit polls</a>, 59 percent of women voted Democratic, 40 percent Republican—a 19 percent edge for Democrats that was double the difference in 2016. Since men gave a four-point edge to Republicans in 2018 (down 8 points from 2016), that’s a total gender gap of 23 points—a record, though only one-point higher than in 2016 since men as well as women moved toward the Democrats.</p>
<p>The continuing differences by sex are clearly connected to race and class. Overall, white women were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans in 2018; the Democratic edge comes entirely from women of color. The split among white women, however, is the result of two drastically different patterns: non-college-educated white women voted Republican by 14 points, while the college-educated voted Democratic by 20 points (59 percent to 39 percent). </p>
<p>The movement of college-educated women to the left shows up dramatically in data on the political views of college freshmen. When <a href="https://www.heri.ucla.edu/briefs/TFS-Brief-Report-2016.pdf">the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute</a> began its national survey of freshman in the 1970s, men were more likely than women to self-identify as “liberal” or “far left.” Now it’s the reverse: 41 percent of women describe themselves as “liberal” or “far left,” compared to 29 percent of the men.</p>
<p>Conservative pundits may ascribe the ideas of college-educated women to their liberal professors (and as a professor, I certainly hope they get <em>some </em>ideas that way). But the UCLA survey reports the views of students in their first year, when they have just arrived on campus. Even at that point in life, among the social stratum going on to college, women have moved to the left and men to the right since the 1970s. </p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">The 2016 election and subsequent developments, such as the #metoo movement and the confirmation hearing of Brett Kavanaugh, have put misogyny in the spotlight more than ever before.</span> But for an explanation of the historical shift that lies behind those events, we have to go back to the enormous—but incomplete—upheaval that’s taken place in gender relations and the economy since the 1970s. (The new Ruth Bader Ginsburg bioepic, <em>On the Basis of Sex</em>, is a great reminder of the magnitude of those changes and how they came about.)</p>
<p>Here the idea of a “stalled revolution” that Arlie Hochschild laid out in her 1989 book <em>The Second Shift </em>seems to me particularly helpful. Revisiting that book in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2014/08/06/the-second-shift-at-25-q-a-with-arlie-hochschild/?utm_term=.5512befe065d">a 2014 interview</a>, Hochschild explained it this way:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">Women have gone into the workforce, that was the revolution, but the workplace they go into and the men they come home to have changed less rapidly, or not at all. Nor has the government that could give them policies that would ease the way, like paid parental leave, paid family medical leave, or subsidized child care…. So what you’ve got are three sources of stall. What’s happening to men. What’s happening to the workplace and missing government help.</p>
<p>In national politics, it’s not just that the changes have stalled. The Republican Party has stalled them. It has become the vehicle and symbol of intransigent traditionalism. When the party chose Trump as its presidential nominee, it heightened the polarization of sexual politics in the first election with a woman as a major-party candidate. The revolution in women’s roles set off a backlash, and Republicans have taken advantage of it, just as they have become the party of racial backlash. The shift of women away from the Republicans is the backlash against the backlash.</p>
<p>I’m not saying Democrats personally or politically are innocent bystanders in the stall. But as things have worked out, while the Democrats have opened themselves to change, the Republicans have identified themselves with reactionary impulses. They know that the entry of women into the workforce and public life is irreversible, but they are refusing to recognize the changes in culture and public policy that have to follow.</p>
<p>If I believed that progress was always inevitable, it would be easy to say that Republicans are on the wrong side of history. But entrenched power doesn’t always yield. I do think, however, that the party that pledges to “make America great again” has worked itself into a position that’s a recipe for American decline.</p>
<p>The United States is experiencing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/us/fertility-rate-decline-united-states.html">a precipitous drop in the birth rate</a>. A decade ago American women were averaging about 2.1 children, which would keep the population steady, but the rate has fallen to about 1.78. Immigration would be one way of avoiding the kind of demographic and economic problems Japan is experiencing, but Republicans want to restrict the number of immigrants, legal and illegal. Reducing the costs of raising children would help boost the birth rate. That would mean supporting an array of policies that benefit young families: paid parental leave, subsidized child care and health care, housing assistance, and college tuition aid. But Republicans want to leave everything to the marketplace. Not only do they have nothing to offer the young women who are especially feeling the stresses of the stalled revolution; they also have no long-term way of ensuring a vital and prosperous society for the future.</p>
<p>Under the circumstances, I don’t think it’s surprising that so many young women would tell Gallup they’d rather live somewhere else. The only way forward for America is to finish the stalled revolution by overcoming the entrenched forces opposed to changes the country needs to make.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 24 Jan 2019 14:29:40 +0000231984 at https://prospect.orgPaul Starr‘I Have an Absolute Right to Cry Wolf,’ Claims the Presidenthttps://prospect.org/article/%E2%80%98i-have-absolute-right-cry-wolf%E2%80%99-claims-president
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_19009075103157_2.jpg?itok=sKGmXq8S" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>President Donald Trump gives a prime-time address about border security at the White House.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he boy who cried “Wolf!” when there wasn’t one should have been stopped the first time, and taught a lesson. A president who declares “national emergency!” when there isn’t one should be stopped the first time too, but it’s not clear our laws will enable that to happen, or that enough people appreciate the danger of not teaching him a lesson.</p>
<p>“I have an absolute right to cry ‘wolf,”” Donald Trump said this week. Actually, what he said was “<a href="https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/government-shutdown-january-2019/h_30bcd46a2979effb2be1f9491c95f9d2">I have the absolute right to declare a national emergency</a>,” but the first is close enough. Where others see desperate women and children on the border seeking asylum, Trump sees wolves—rapists and murderers, gang members, and criminals.</p>
<p>Many people in Washington are apparently relieved that by using an emergency declaration to secure the $5.7 billion in funds he wants for his wall, the president could end the impasse with Congress and allow the government to reopen. Some expect the courts will overturn the declaration, so there’s nothing to worry about: The shutdown ends, Trump can say to Rush Limbaugh and his base he did everything he could to build the wall, and the Constitution stands. According to <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/10/18175957/national-emergency-declare-legal-constitution">Dara Lind at <em>Vox</em></a>, some of Trump’s own advisers who support the emergency declaration think the courts will overturn it.</p>
<p>Others expect that the emergency declaration will get bogged down in litigation. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/us/politics/donald-trump-national-emergency.html"><em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em> quotes</a> former solicitor general Walter E. Dellinger III as saying the issue will likely take at least a year to resolve in court:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">“We’re going to be in 2020 before this gets resolved. … If they are just planning where to build slats, judges are unlikely to decide that requires expedition in the Supreme Court. I think they would recognize the wisdom of going slow.”</p>
<p>Still others assure us that a declaration of national emergency is no big deal because it’s in line with statutory authority given by Congress and therefore not a step toward dictatorship. <a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/everyone-calm-down-about-declaration-national-emergency">“Everyone Calm Down About that Declaration of National Emergency”</a> writes the managing editor of <em>Lawfare</em>, Quinta Jurecic.</p>
<p>I am not reassured, and I hope you aren’t either.</p>
<p>There is no guarantee the courts will overturn an emergency declaration. The Supreme Court has been extremely deferential to the executive branch whenever the president invokes national security. In a perfectly timed article in <em><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/presidential-emergency-powers/576418/">The Atlantic</a></em>, Elizabeth Goitein notes, “The moment the president declares a ‘national emergency’—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—more than 100 special provisions become available to him.” If the courts do decide the declaration is entirely within Trump’s discretion—that judges, in effect, cannot rule on whether or not there is a wolf—Trump will have a carte blanche for much more dangerous uses of emergency powers in the future.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Will Trump’s claim of emergency powers get bogged down in the courts?</span> The emergency-powers issue has to be distinguished from clashes over eminent domain and property rights, which many observers reasonably expect could take time to resolve. But for the courts to slow-walk a ruling on the declaration of emergency would be tantamount to a decision that no genuine emergency exists. After all, the very idea of an emergency is that immediate action is imperative. The White House could reasonably argue for an expedited decision.</p>
<p>And what about the argument that because Congress has given the president authority to declare national emergencies, this is not a case of the president making an unlimited claim of emergency powers (under the vesting clause of Article II) or acting entirely outside the Constitution? Trump is just trying to shuffle around money already appropriated for military construction projects, so no biggie, right? </p>
<p>But this is a clear-cut case where Congress has said no to the request. Conservatives as well as liberals ought to be outraged by a president who declares a national emergency on false grounds so as to spend money for a purpose Congress has refused to approve. If presidents can resolve an impasse with legislators unilaterally with an emergency declaration, Congress loses its control of the purse strings—a foundation of the separation of powers. Some conservatives have cautioned against the president’s sidestepping Congress, but only in a mild way, as setting a bad precedent.</p>
<p>A false declaration of national emergency ought to be treated as a serious—indeed, an impeachable—offense, lest it become the basis for wholesale executive aggrandizement of the kind we are seeing in other countries. Under the Constitution, the president is required to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Unjustified resort to emergency power is a violation of that duty.</p>
<p>A false claim of an emergency ought to be treated as a grave offense for another reason. In the Aesop’s fable about the boy who cried wolf, there comes a time when there is a real wolf, and the villagers don’t respond to the boy’s cries. Trump’s phony border crisis and perpetual lying raise the same danger. If Trump goes on national television again to tell us about a threat to the country, who would believe him except his own base? Who wouldn’t worry that he was just using a pretext for some ulterior motive? Trust in the word of a national leader is a vital requirement for national security, and Americans have no basis for that trust today. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 11 Jan 2019 16:55:36 +0000231905 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrThe Progressive Caucus and New Democrat Coalition Could Help Consolidate the Party’s Presidential Fieldhttps://prospect.org/article/progressive-caucus-and-new-democrat-coalition-could-help-consolidate-party%E2%80%99s-presidential
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_17256721903832.jpg?itok=N_OTVQuU" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Andrew Harnik</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Senator Elizabeth Warren, right, accompanied by Senator Bernie Sanders, left, speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill. </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he Democrats are now likely to have even more presidential aspirants in 2020 than the 17 that the Republicans had in 2016, a precedent that ought to inspire concern about the outcome. A large field favors a candidate who enters the race with certain assets—high prior name recognition, a big personality, personal wealth or a large donor network, perhaps a talent for capturing attention by stoking intense reactions. </p>
<p>In the <a href="http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/12/15/rel1iademocrats.pdf">first Iowa poll</a> of likely Democratic caucus-goers by CNN/<em>Des Moines Register</em>/Mediacom, three male B’s—Biden, Bernie, and Beto—dominated the field (Joe Biden at 32 percent, Bernie Sanders at 19 percent, and Beto O’Rourke at 11 percent), with all the other candidates in single digits, though Elizabeth Warren trailed O’Rourke only slightly, at 8 percent. Of course, it’s an early poll, with a large margin of error (4.6 percent), but with the first poll testing an incomplete list of 20 candidates, it’s not too early to be concerned about the process for consolidating the field.</p>
<p>In 2016, the Republican Party effectively subcontracted a critical part of the winnowing process to the television networks, which used polls to divide the candidates into two tiers for debates. The candidates consigned to the junior varsity never recovered, and the top-tier debates were still so large that the participants were forced to clamor for 30 seconds to respond to one-minute answers. It’s a great format if you’re good at zingers, but no one would mistake it for the Lincoln-Douglas debates. </p>
<p>Any day now, the <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2018-12-14/democrats-eye-earlier-2020-presidential-primary-debates-minimizing-polls-for-parity">Democratic National Committee is expected</a> to take the first step in laying out plans for a series of debates in 2019. The initial step will likely be an announcement of the number of debates and the date for the first one, with other decisions deferred until a DNC meeting in March. There is talk about mixing together high- and low-visibility candidates in the debates and using other criteria besides polling numbers, such as the extent of campaign organization, to determine who gets included at all. </p>
<p>But even with these modifications, the DNC-sponsored debates are likely to be too big and unwieldy. There are just too many incentives for candidates to run, and not enough filters to screen out secondary candidates who represent the same views as stronger candidates from the same wing of the party. Smaller but more clarifying debates would be more valuable to help decide which candidates ought to represent which viewpoints.</p>
<p>Here’s where the two major caucuses among congressional Democrats—the Progressive Caucus and the New Democrat Coalition—could play a constructive role in sponsoring their own debates among limited groups of candidates whom they could vote to invite. </p>
<p>For example, the Progressive Caucus might invite Sanders, Warren, and Sherrod Brown to debate the issues and explain why they should receive the support of the party’s left. <span class="pullquote-right">A straw vote by secret ballot in the caucus would be a strong signal to progressive voters.</span> Once the Progressive Caucus took that step, the New Democrats might do the same. Both the debates and straw votes could help winnow down the presidential field in a constructive way.</p>
<p>Am I talking about bringing back the “elites” into the nomination process just after the DNC stripped superdelegates of their vote on the first ballot at the Democratic Convention? </p>
<p>Yes, I am. Another name for this is “peer review.” I’d like to know what the candidates’ peers collectively think of them as potential presidents. After all, the members of Congress get a close-up view of most of the candidates that few of us have. </p>
<p>These early debates wouldn’t have to be carried by a television network. In fact, with all the available platforms for live-streaming events, there’s no longer any need for the parties to depend on the television networks to carry debates, much less an imperative to negotiate with them about the format and the participants.</p>
<p>These early debates would also have a different function from the ones held closer to the voting. The critical early audience consists of the most politically engaged, the kind of people who are going to talk to their friends about the candidates, work in campaigns, and help build the enormous collective effort the Democrats will need in 2020. The DNC and the party’s congressional caucuses should take that process directly under their own control.</p>
<p>There is a distant historical precedent for the involvement of members of Congress. In the early history of the United States, the congressional caucuses chose the candidates for president. I’m not suggesting we resurrect that system. But instead of ceding the winnowing process to the TV networks or to big donors—or allowing the field to grow to such unmanageable proportions that it becomes impossible to have constructive debates—the members of Congress could again play a useful role in presidential nominations. </p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 19 Dec 2018 21:16:47 +0000231698 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrThe Democrats Are Being Pulled Both to the Left and to the Centerhttps://prospect.org/article/democrats-are-being-pulled-both-left-and-center
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_18311155446348.jpg?itok=fS_HEOzL" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">David Guralnick/Detroit News via AP</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Gretchen Whitmer gives her acceptance speech after being elected the next governor of Michigan, in Detroit. </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>re the Democrats, as so many people believe, moving left, or are they gravitating to the center? Actually, the results of this year’s primary and general elections show there is movement in both directions, setting the party up for future conflicts.</p>
<p>Let’s look at the congressional results. Perry Bacon, Jr. at <em><a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-houses-progressive-caucus-will-be-bigger-than-ever-in-2019/">FiveThirtyEight</a></em> makes the case that the Democrats are moving left by comparing their House membership in 2010, the last time they controlled the chamber, to their incoming membership. Eight years ago, the Progressive Caucus had 80 members, while the Blue Dog Coalition, the most conservative Democrats, had 54. But in 2019, according to Bacon, the Progressive Caucus will rise to 96, while the Blue Dogs will number only 24. By that measure, the House Democrats have moved sharply to the left.</p>
<p>The picture looks different, however, if we compare the Progressive Caucus with the centrist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democrat_Coalition">New Democrat Coalition</a> in the House and focus specifically on the new members who won districts previously held by Republicans. Democrats flipped 42 seats while losing two, for a net pickup of 40 (with one further addition possible in North Carolina). </p>
<p>So far, by my count, 24 of the new members who flipped seats have joined the New Democrats, while only 11 have joined the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Progressive_Caucus#House_members">Progressive Caucus</a> (including four who joined both groups). Altogether, with 89 members, the New Democrats will be only slightly smaller than the Progressive Caucus.</p>
<p>Competing forces are at work. The Democrats who flipped seats did so mostly in suburban districts where they attracted votes from independents and Republican moderates in what was an exceptionally strong year for Democrats. Many of the successful candidates were recruited to run precisely because they would appeal to moderates. That more of them joined the New Democrats than the Progressive Caucus should not be surprising.</p>
<p>At the same time, in urban districts that have previously been Democratic, generational turnover and ethnic succession are leading to a shift toward the left. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes’s upset of Joe Crowley in New York City is the paradigmatic case.</p>
<p>But the huge publicity given Ocasio-Cortes has obscured what are really two distinct developments: While progressives have gained ground in long-held Democratic areas, more centrist candidates have won the more competitive districts. This second development will limit how far to the left the party can go. The more the party expands into the suburbs, the more dependent it will be on those relatively centrist votes—and that dependence will become a constraint on the policies that Democrats are able to agree on.</p>
<p>Now let’s turn to the states, where Democrats picked up seven governorships in 2018: Michigan (Gretchen Whitmer), Illinois (J.B. Pritzker), Wisconsin (Tony Evers), Maine (Janet Mills), Kansas (Laura Kelly), Nevada (Steve Sisolak), and New Mexico (Michelle Luhan Grisham). Several of these new Democratic governors (notably Whitmer, Mills, and Sisolak) defeated candidates to their left in the primaries; all of them seem to me best described as center-left rather than progressive (in the left sense of that term).</p>
<p>To these new Democratic governors, we can add the two elected in 2017: Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Ralph Northam of Virginia, both of whom defeated primary opponents to their left before winning the general election.</p>
<p>The big gubernatorial wins for progressives in Democratic primaries in 2018 came in Florida (Andrew Gillum), Georgia (Stacey Abrams), Maryland (Ben Jealous), and Ohio (Richard Cordray). Although all four were ultimately defeated, Gillum and Abrams probably were stronger candidates—certainly they were more inspiring—than their more centrist primary opponents, and if not for Republican voter suppression in Georgia and Florida, they might have gone on to win. </p>
<p>But here’s the bottom line. <span class="pullquote-right">Where Democrats made gains in the House and governorships, nearly all of the candidates were center-left rather than progressive. </span>Somehow this striking pattern has been lost in all the talk about the party moving left.</p>
<p>Despite the growing strength of progressives in the party’s old strongholds, several forces are pulling Democrats to the center. The first is obvious. As the Republicans have moved to the far right, they have opened up ground in the center and created opportunities for Democratic gains. What Donald Trump has done nationally to alienate moderates, far-right Republican governors in Kansas, Maine, and elsewhere have done in their states. </p>
<p>Second, the Republicans’ shift to the right has led to an infusion of financial contributions to Democrats from centrist or even center-right donors. Michael Bloomberg, who gave Democratic candidates $100 million in 2018, is only the best known. Writing at <em><a href="http://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/no-labels-nancy-pelosi-speaker-house-no-labels/">The Intercept</a></em>, Lee Fang points to a series of major Republican donors switching to Democrats this year and notes correctly, “Though national media attention has focused largely on newly elected democratic socialists and progressive members, the House Democratic caucus has also swelled with pro-business moderates.”</p>
<p>A third factor contributing to centrist gains is the widespread sense of high danger to the country posed by Trump and the Republicans today. Democratic primary voters are so concerned to pick candidates who can win that they may be treating candidates’ policies as secondary to their electability. Where Democrats hold relatively safe seats, Democratic primary voters may feel free to vote their ideological preferences, but they may think about those choices differently in competitive districts and states.</p>
<p>In other words, the same voter might vote for a centrist in a competitive district and a progressive in a safe district. The first vote might help secure a Democratic majority, while the second might push that majority toward more progressive policies. </p>
<p>These considerations, it seems to me, could become important in next year’s Democratic primaries. Democratic voters may be less concerned about which candidate’s views most closely match their own than about which one can defeat Trump (assuming Trump runs again). So they may value a candidate’s ability to attract moderates even if their own views are progressive. </p>
<p>That kind of calculation may help explain a striking result in a <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/245462/democrats-favor-moderate-party-gop-conservative.aspx?utm_source=alert&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=morelink&amp;utm_campaign=syndication">Gallup poll conducted November 13-18</a> that asked Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents whether “you would rather see the Democratic Party become more liberal or become more moderate.” While 41 percent said “more liberal,” 54 percent said “more moderate,” despite a recent tendency that Gallup notes for more Democrats to self-identify as liberal.</p>
<p>If the Republican nomination is a foregone conclusion, moreover, the Democratic primaries may attract a lot of independent or center-right voters who might otherwise have voted in the Republican primaries. This is especially likely in states that don’t require primary voters to have registered in advance as members of a party. Many observers assume that each party’s primaries attract disproportionate numbers of “extreme” partisans, but that may not be so for the Democratic presidential primaries in 2020.</p>
<p>For the moment, the ideological divisions between centrist and progressive Democrats are relatively subdued because Democrats are united against Trump and the Republicans. But if they regain power nationally in 2020, the party’s internal divisions will become more salient, and the results of the congressional races will become more important. The Senate will likely be an even greater constraint than the House. If it isn’t clear now, it will become clear then that while the congressional Democrats are more liberal than they were at the start of the Obama presidency, the centrists will set limits on what the party can do. </p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 13 Dec 2018 10:00:00 +0000231638 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrThe ‘Weekly Standard’ and the Eclipse of the Center-Righthttps://prospect.org/article/%E2%80%98weekly-standard%E2%80%99-and-eclipse-center-right
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_17211664958672.jpg?itok=rypDoVQI" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Photo by Colin Young-Wolff/Invision/AP</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>The <em>Weekly Standard</em>'s founder and editor-at-large Bill Kristol speaks in Pasadena, California. </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he news that the owner of the <em>Weekly Standard </em><a href="https://nypost.com/2018/12/05/the-weekly-standard-expected-to-shut-down/">may shut it down</a> highlights how conservative political journalism and media continue to change as a result of one of the most important recent developments in American politics—the collapse of the center-right.</p>
<p>A decade ago, as I recalled in an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/opinion/trump-center-right-america.html">op-ed</a> in <em>The </em><em>New York Times </em>in October, prominent commentators confidently asserted that the United States is a “center-right country,” a claim that had some plausibility when George W. Bush was president. But since then, first under Barack Obama and now even more under Donald Trump, the center-right has lost influence nationally and even within the Republican Party, leaving many people with those views politically homeless. </p>
<p>Indeed, as Republicans have moved right, what counts as “center-right” has moved further right too, from the Rockefeller Republicans of a half century ago to the Bush Republicans and now even to many traditional conservatives and neoconservatives who have refused to go along with Trump.</p>
<p>The <em>Weekly Standard </em>has been the foremost intellectual voice of #NeverTrump conservatives, and that appears to be precisely the reason for its troubles today. Founded in 1995 by the neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes and financed originally by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp., the <em>Weekly Standard </em>enjoyed its peak influence during the Bush years. </p>
<p>In 2009, however, two years after buying <em>The </em><em>Wall Street Journal</em>, Murdoch decided that he no longer needed the <em>Standard </em>and sold it to another right-wing billionaire, Phil Anschutz, who purchased it through one of his firms, the Clarity Media Group, the parent company of the <em>Washington Examiner</em>. But now, like Murdoch before him, Anschutz seems to have decided that the <em>Standard </em>has outlived its political usefulness. In an apparently related development, the <em>Washington Examiner</em>, which has been more supportive of Trump, has <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/press-release-washington-examiner-to-expand-into-a-nationally-distributed-magazine-with-a-broadened-editorial-focus">announced it is expanding into a national magazine</a>.</p>
<p>The <em>Standard</em>’s problems are not just a matter of being out of sync with the president and therefore with conservative readers. Its difficulties reflect a more general development in conservative media that began before Trump’s election and has intensified since then. </p>
<p>The new book <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Network-Propaganda-Manipulation-Disinformation-Radicalization/dp/0190923636">Network Propaganda</a></em>, by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, helps clarify the shift on the right through two different “maps” of American media and political communication over the period from 2015 to 2018. One map describes the hyperlinking patterns in online media (who links to whom), while the other describes the content sharing practices (liking, sharing, retweeting) of Facebook and Twitter users. The analysis is based on nearly “four million political stories from over 40,000 online news sources.”</p>
<p>One of the findings that emerges from this analysis is that center-right media are a negligible force online:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">We find that the influence in the right-wing media ecosystem, whether judged by hyperlinks, Twitter sharing, or Facebook sharing, is both highly skewed to the far right and highly insulated from other segments of the network, from center-right (which is nearly nonexistent) through the far left.</p>
<p>Sites like Fox News and <em>Breitbart</em>, according to Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, not only are the big hubs of right-wing communication; they are also far more prone to rumors and conspiracy theories. The rest of the media—stretching from that “nearly nonexistent” center-right to the left—“operates as an interconnected network anchored by organizations, both for profit and nonprofit, that adhere to professional journalistic norms.”</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">In other words, center-right media have had the same problem as center-right politicians: They don’t connect to what is now the core of the Republican Party. </span>Since the <em>Weekly Standard </em>has no immediate prospect of recovering the influence it once enjoyed in the White House and elite levels of the Republican Party, it’s easy to see why Anschutz may have decided to cut his losses and place his bet on a publication more likely to resonate with conservatives.</p>
<p>But this also seems like a short-sighted decision. The center-right is down, but it isn’t out. Center-right views are well represented among the more affluent in the United States and especially among the corporate elite. Their influence is sure to be felt in the future.</p>
<p>It's also short-sighted of liberals and progressives to take any pleasure in the <em>Weekly Standard</em>’s troubles. As <a href="https://newrepublic.com/minutes/152524/weekly-standards-troubles-worry-political-foes-well-friends">Jeet Heer writes at the <em>New Republic</em></a>, whatever replaces the <em>Standard </em>is likely to be worse. </p>
<p>In a country where we expect power to alternate between the right and left, it’s a dangerous thing when the far right displaces the center-right. You don’t have to be a partisan of the center-right to prefer that it prevail over Trumpism. So when the dust clears, I hope the editors and writers for the <em>Standard </em>find another patron or another platform. I look forward to a time when they and others on the center-right represent the right in the great intellectual and political debates the nation deserves to have. </p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 05 Dec 2018 23:10:05 +0000231620 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrHow Democrats Finally Won with Health Carehttps://prospect.org/article/how-democrats-finally-won-health-care
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_18177606540403.jpg?itok=-1v6vpbm" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Andrew Harnik</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, foreground, speaks at a news conference on pre-existing health conditions on Capitol Hill. </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><em>Update (November 21, 2018): </em></p>
<p><em>The </em>Washington Post <em><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/new-york-congressman-who-signed-letter-against-pelosi-now-says-hell-support-her/2018/11/21/24212438-ed9f-11e8-baac-2a674e91502b_story.html?utm_term=.9415e17ab338">reports</a>:</em></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>Rep. Brian Higgins of New York said he had changed his mind [and endorsed Nancy Pelosi for speaker] after securing an “agreement in principle” that Democrats would undertake a “serious good faith effort” to advance legislation lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 50 as well as a trillion-dollar infrastructure blitz. </em></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>In a statement, Pelosi praised Higgins … and said his proposal to allow Americans as young as 50 to “buy in” to Medicare is “central to this debate, as we work to build on the Affordable Care Act.”</em></p>
<p><em>In the piece below published yesterday, I was urging Democrats to focus on early eligibility for Medicare as the most feasible and politically potent idea for substantially advancing health-care reform. Pelosi’s agreement to make a “serious good faith effort” on that issue should push it to the forefront of discussion among House Democrats in the run-up to the 2020 election. That will raise a host of questions about what such a measure would look like in practice—just the discussion I have been hoping for to advance this idea on the progressive agenda.</em></p>
<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>t took a long time, but the Affordable Care Act finally paid off politically for Democrats in the 2018 election. According to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/midterm-exit-polls-2018-n932516">exit polls</a>, voters rated health care the top issue, and they trusted Democrats on it more than Republicans. The big questions now are the impact the election results may have on health policy in the next two years and the lessons Democrats should draw for 2020 and beyond.</p>
<p>In 2018, unlike the other elections since the ACA’s passage in 2010, voters had seen what Republicans were actually proposing to do about health insurance. “You’re going to have such great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost, and it’s going to be so easy,” Donald Trump <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-VTbt-i_b4">promised</a> in 2016. But when it came time to deliver, the legislation passed by Republicans in the House and endorsed by Trump would have resulted in millions of people losing coverage and sharply increased costs for others, especially for older people buying insurance in the individual market. Unable to pass that bill in the Senate, Republicans saw the whole repeal-and-replace effort collapse.</p>
<p>Seizing on the Republicans’ failed rollback, Democratic congressional candidates and the groups supporting them highlighted health care more than any other issue. According to an analysis by <a href="http://mediaproject.wesleyan.edu/releases/101818-tv/">Wesleyan Media Project</a>, 54.5 percent of all Democratic ads from September 18 to October 15 discussed health care; those ads focused overwhelmingly on protecting people with preexisting conditions and on Republican efforts to undo the progress under the ACA. “We’ve made it about their sabotage, their repeal agenda. We’ve kept the focus on them,” the head of the liberal group Protect Our Care, Brad Woodhouse, told <em>The</em> <em>Washington Post </em>in an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-health-202/2018/11/06/the-health-202-democrats-stuck-to-their-message-on-health-care-and-it-might-win-them-the-house/5be07c121b326b39290545dc/?utm_term=.7e0ed2edace2">article</a> published on election day.</p>
<p>Not only do the election results put an end, at least for the next two years, to Republican congressional efforts to undo the ACA; the voters also chose to extend coverage. Five states are now likely to expand Medicaid—three (Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah) where voters passed referenda in favor of expansion, and two (Kansas and Maine) where a shift from a Republican to a Democratic governor removes the last obstacle to expansion. Two states, however, did see setbacks. The defeat of a tobacco tax on the ballot in Montana and the election of a Republican as governor of Alaska put previous Medicaid expansions at risk, though it’s unclear whether those will be reversed.</p>
<p>So is the ACA now a settled achievement? Unfortunately, no.</p>
<p>Republicans are still resisting and undermining the reforms. They continue to pursue litigation to declare the law unconstitutional. (The conservative judge in the case now pending <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/opinion/republican-lawsuit-pre-existing-coverage.html">may well have postponed a decision</a> until after the election to avoid damaging Republicans’ electoral chances.) Fourteen Republican-controlled states, including Florida and Texas, still have not expanded Medicaid and show no signs of doing so. </p>
<p>Nationally, the Republican Congress and Trump administration have already adopted measures that are going to weaken the reforms. The 2017 tax legislation effectively repealed the individual mandate as of this coming year, which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will lead to four million fewer people insured in 2019 and 12 million fewer in 2021. The administration has also approved regulations for “short-term health plans” and “association health plans” that will allow insurers to circumvent the ACA’s rules for required coverage of pre-existing conditions and services such as mental health care. As a result, insurers offering junk coverage at cheap prices will be able to skim off healthier people from the ACA’s marketplaces. The long-term result of these changes will be to raise premiums in the marketplaces, seeming to confirm conservative predictions that the ACA is unworkable.</p>
<p>In the new Congress, Democrats in the House will try to move ahead with legislation to stabilize the marketplaces and improve coverage, as well as reforms to control pharmaceutical prices (an issue where as yet they have no consensus). But if any changes to the ACA reforms make it through the Senate and into law, they are unlikely to solve the problems that Trump and the Republicans are deliberately bringing about. </p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">So as the 2020 election shapes up, the battle over the ACA is likely to continue, and Democrats will need to fight to preserve the gains made so far. </span>At the same time, they will also be looking to develop a more ambitious program. </p>
<p>Think of the choices for the future this way: The United States now has three principal national platforms for publicly supported health insurance—Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA marketplaces—that reforms might extend. As recent developments have shown, both Medicaid and the ACA marketplaces have severe political vulnerabilities and limitations. Deep red states not only have refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA; many of them are also imposing work requirements and other rules that will result in many otherwise eligible people losing Medicaid coverage. The ACA marketplaces have faced obstruction from the same states. Even where the marketplaces have been working relatively well, most of the enrollees end up in plans at the silver or bronze levels that leave them with substantial out-of-pocket costs and difficulties in paying for services. </p>
<p>In contrast, Medicare does not suffer from vulnerability to red-state resistance, and it has done a better job of controlling costs and ensuring access to care. That’s why I agree with many on the left who want to expand Medicare. But for a variety of reasons—the fiscal costs and tax implications, the perceived threat to people with good private coverage, opposition from seniors, and not least of all, the guaranteed, full-throated resistance of the health care industry—"Medicare for all” will be too great a lift politically even if Democrats win back the White House in 2020 and eke out a majority in the Senate.</p>
<p>The more practical objective, as Harold Pollack suggests in a recent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/opinion/sunday/democrats-aca-medicaid-exchanges.html?action=click&amp;module=Opinion&amp;pgtype=Homepage"><em>New York Times </em>op-ed</a>, is to make Medicare more widely available. Even here, though, reformers have to be careful, lest employers and state governments dump all the high risks into the Medicare program.</p>
<p>As I’ve argued before, the most practical way forward—and the one most likely to be successful in practice—is to open up Medicare to people age 50 to 64 and to extend the use of Medicare prices in the ACA marketplaces. Under a proposal I call “<a href="http://prospect.org/article/new-strategy-health-care">Midlife Medicare</a>”—a stepped-up version of what others refer to as a Medicare “buy in”—people age 50 to 64 who are otherwise uninsured would be able to apply the ACA premium subsidies to purchase either a public Medicare plan or a private Medicare Advantage plan. The coverage could follow the lines of the ACA’s “essential health benefits,” while payment rates were based on Medicare’s prices. </p>
<p>The Medicare framework has three advantages over the ACA framework. </p>
<ul style="margin-left: 40px;"><li>First, “traditional” Medicare serves not only as a “public option” but as a benchmark for the pricing of private options. </li>
<li>Second, that Medicare benchmark is equivalent to the gold level in the ACA (80 percent of average expected costs, not 70 percent as in an ACA silver plan or 60 percent as in a bronze plan). </li>
<li>Third, when Medicare beneficiaries go out of network in a private plan, they still pay only Medicare rates, a rule that effectively caps what providers can demand from insurers to be in-network. As a result, Medicare has a system of price regulation applying to both public and private plans—a means of limiting costs that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the American health-care system.</li>
</ul><p>“Midlife Medicare” wouldn’t only offer a benefit to people age 50 to 64. By drawing the more costly older population out of the risk pool in the ACA exchanges, it would also substantially lower premiums for the people under age 50 remaining.</p>
<p>A program geared to 50-to-64 year olds has important political advantages. Many seniors think of Medicare as being distinctly for them and worry that if Medicare were for everyone, they would lose the special protection they’ve earned. But the 50-to-64 year olds have also earned that protection, and AARP seeks to represent all Americans 50 years of age and up.</p>
<p>Moreover, by the time they reach midlife, Americans are generally more concerned about health care and more likely to make it a voting issue. Here there is a lesson from the 2018 election about the key importance of framing health-care appeals to voters in midlife. In an article in <em>Politico</em>, “<a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/13/2018-election-analysis-democrats-republicans-politics-222412">How Democrats Won over Older Voters—and Flipped the House</a>,” Zach Stanton, Steven Shepard, and Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna point out that not only was health care “the single-most-discussed issue in political ads in 2018” but many of these ads focused on the provision in the Republican House bill that would have allowed insurers to charge individuals age 50 to 64 more than five times as much as younger people:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">In races from upstate New York to the Arizona-Mexico border to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to the suburbs of Richmond, Va., Democratic challengers flipped GOP-held House seats while running ads accusing Republicans of supporting this so-called Age Tax, using a term popularized by the political arm of the AARP. </p>
<p>Democrats continued in 2018 to enjoy more support among younger voters. But exit polls indicate that instead of losing voters age 50 to 64 by ten points (as they had in 2016), Democrats this year virtually erased that gap. The focus on health care helped make that possible.</p>
<p>Many in the Democratic base want nothing less than Medicare for all, and whoever wins the 2020 presidential nomination may well endorse that as a goal, as some candidates already have. But if the candidates focus on what is likely to be achievable, “Medicare for more” will make more sense than “Medicare for all.” And the practical step here will be to move Medicare into midlife.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 20 Nov 2018 00:03:56 +0000231557 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrIs Xenophobia Politically Rational?https://prospect.org/article/xenophobia-politically-rational
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_18310190772685.jpg?itok=3JOyXC0q" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Jeff Roberson</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Members of the audience cheer as President Donald Trump leaves the stage at the end of a campaign rally in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">J</span>ust as he had in 2016, Donald Trump defied the conventional wisdom about how to win in 2018 by making inflammatory statements about immigrants and refugees. This year, when he might have emphasized the state of the economy, he chose instead in the final weeks of the campaign to whip up hysteria about the immigrant caravan in Mexico, claim that refugees bring in gangs and terrorists, and call for an end to birthright citizenship.</p>
<p>Trump’s incendiary rhetoric has renewed a debate about whether he and other Republicans who have made similar appeals to their base are acting impulsively from the gut or according to a rational political logic. The results of the 2018 election now provide more evidence on that question, though not a definitive answer.</p>
<p>Before the election, Matt A. Barreto—a UCLA political scientist who is a co-founder of Latino Decisions, which advises Democratic candidates—<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/trump-caravan-immigration-midterms.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion">wrote</a> that although Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign might resonate with his core supporters in 2018, “the reality of his anti-immigrant policies” such as the child separations “turned off” more voters. Citing public opinion data favorable to immigration, Barreto argued, “Mr. Trump’s vile strategy is more likely to backfire this time.”</p>
<p>I wish we could say with certainty that Barreto was right. Exit polls indicate that Trump and other Republicans (together with Fox News and other right-wing media) succeeded in raising the salience of immigration in voters’ minds. And while the immigration issue may have hurt Republicans in the suburban House districts that flipped to the Democrats, it may also have helped mobilize Republican voters in the red states where the party won or retained seats in the Senate. </p>
<p>How do anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies work for Trump and the Republicans? It seems to me there are several distinct ways.</p>
<p>First, inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants—and the inflammatory aspect here is crucial—draws attention from other issues. The most important legislation Republicans have passed under Trump is the 2017 Tax Act, and ordinarily a party campaigns on its big legislative accomplishments. But the tax bill has been hugely unpopular and has even fallen flat with much of the Republican base, so Trump and his party just decided not to talk much about it. Revving up hysteria about immigration was a perfect distraction.</p>
<p>Second, at a time when crime rates are low and the United States faces no military threat, the hysteria about immigration enables Trump and the Republicans to cast themselves as protectors of the people’s safety and security. Much of Trump’s appeal to his conservative base, including conservative women, comes from this idea of the strongman as national protector. <span class="pullquote-right">Without a real threat to serve as a focal point for fear, a phantom threat has been the next best thing.</span></p>
<p>Third, there is an economic message in anti-immigrant policies, especially to working-class voters who for decades have faced insecurity and stagnant incomes. The message is that Republicans are going to raise wages by restricting labor supply, that is, by deporting the “illegals” and blocking new immigrants. That goes along with trade policies limiting imports from China and elsewhere. The restrictive immigration and trade policies seem to make sense to many workers, who remember a time, in the decades after World War II, when there were few immigrants and little foreign competition, and wages grew steadily. </p>
<p>Fourth, the anti-immigrant policies also communicate a determination to avoid spending tax money on people who have not earned public benefits, as workers do when they pay their “contributions” to Social Security and Medicare. To many of the native born, needy immigrants seem like potential competitors not only for jobs but also for government largesse. </p>
<p>Trump and the Republicans have stoked hatred and fear of immigrants with so many lies and distortions that liberals and progressives may believe they need only convey the facts and a more accurate and sympathetic picture of who immigrants are and what they contribute to American society. To many of us, Trump’s actions and words seem so obvious a violation of the nation’s traditions and our best interests that it is hard to grasp why all Americans have not decisively repudiated the president. </p>
<p>But in this election the voters didn’t repudiate nativism—at least not enough of them did to give Democrats decisive control of Congress. If anti-immigrant appeals had clearly backfired, there might be some hope Trump and the Republicans would drop those appeals in the run-up to the 2020 election. But I don’t see that happening. For this president and his party, xenophobia isn’t an irrational impulse. As a political strategy, it works for them, the larger and long-run consequences for America be damned. And that’s more frightening than an irrational hatred of foreigners would be. </p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 08 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000231498 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrThe Message of the Synagogue Slaughterhttps://prospect.org/article/message-synagogue-slaughter
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_18302480343140.jpg?itok=VLJXlRsd" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even"> (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Stars of David are displayed in front of the Tree of Life Synagogue with the names of those killed in the shooting in Pittsburgh.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">N</span>ot all shocks should surprise us. When political leaders summon up the dark forces of racial hatred and xenophobia, violence is bound to follow, whether or not they order it directly. The murder of 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue may have seemed like a throwback to the bloody chapters of the past, but it carried an unmistakable, present-day stamp of presidential influence.</p>
<p>Shortly before the accused assassin, Robert Bowers, entered the Tree of Life synagogue Saturday morning, he posted a message on social media identifying HIAS, the Jewish agency that resettles refugees, as the immediate source of his fury: “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”</p>
<p>Where would Bowers have gotten the idea that refugees are “invaders” who “kill our people”? That is hardly a random thought today in the United States, nor is it confined to the political fringes. It’s an idea being promoted by Donald Trump and other Republicans, especially in the past few weeks, when for transparent political purposes they have stoked anger about a caravan of immigrants from Honduras making their way through Mexico.</p>
<p>Before Saturday, I hadn’t heard of HIAS (originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), and it hadn’t occurred to me that Jews had a connection to the current, Trump-inspired furor over refugees, even though right-wingers have been falsely accusing George Soros of financing the Honduran immigrant caravan.</p>
<p>But the Pittsburgh slaughter was a wake-up call. <span class="pullquote-right">It was a reminder that Jews and refugees continue to be connected even at a time when the refugees themselves are not Jewish.</span> And it was personal wake-up call for those of us who owe our very existence to the welcome that America gave to refugees in the past.</p>
<p>HIAS traces its origins to the efforts to help Jews fleeing imperial Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As I read about the organization, I realized that it may well have helped my maternal grandparents come to America in 1905. They were refugees, too, fleeing anti-Semitic violence in a city called Kishinev—now Chișinău, the capital of Moldova—at that time part of the Russian empire.</p>
<p>A new book, <em>Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History</em>, by Steven Zipperstein, a historian at Stanford University, provides a powerful account of the riots that took the lives of 49 Jews over two days, April 19 and 20, 1903. This was not a spontaneous event. Relations between Jews and their neighbors in Kishinev had not been fraught until a rabid anti-Semite named Pavel Krushevan began publishing a local newspaper. Krushevan, Zipperstein notes, would later go on to publish the original edition of the <em>Protocols of the Elders of Zion</em>, one of the central texts of modern anti-Semitism. His followers were at the center of the pogrom. And Robert Bowers is only one of many anti-Semites descended from them.</p>
<p>Protests over the Kishinev pogrom, along with groups offering help to Jewish refugees, sprung up as far away as New York. The media of the time, reviled by anti-Semites, played a role in that response. Shortly after the pogrom, the Hearst newspapers commissioned Michael Davitt, a radical Irish journalist, to go to Kishinev to investigate, while a Jewish group in nearby Odessa sent a young writer named Haym Bialik. Davitt’s articles contributed to the international uproar, and Bialik wrote a poem, “In the City of Killing,” which became a literary classic.</p>
<p>This is still the vocation of journalists and artists: to report on injustice, to memorialize it, and to stir protest and resistance by identifying those who are responsible.</p>
<p>In this case, the line of responsibility goes back to President Trump, as a Jewish group in Pittsburgh, Bend the Arc, has made clear in an <a href="https://www.bendthearc.us/open_letter_to_president_trump">open letter</a> to the president, saying he is not welcome in the city until he denounces white nationalism and stops his assault on immigrants and refugees. Trump cannot continue to incite fear and hatred without being held accountable for the consequences.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 29 Oct 2018 21:31:27 +0000231401 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrHow Independents May Swing Four Races for Governorhttps://prospect.org/article/how-independents-may-swing-four-races-governor
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_18290852359659.jpg?itok=-u9oDSUG" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">(AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Maine gubernatorial candidate Democrat Janet Mills, far left, speaks during a debate with fellow candidates independent Alan Caron, independent Teresea Hayes, and Republican Shawn Moody, on October 17, 2018 in Augusta, Maine.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">M</span>any people talk about independents as though they are a coherent group in America, but independent voters and candidates are all over the map—politically and geographically.</p>
<p>Although the “independent” label suggests a high-minded detachment from partisanship, the great majority of independents lean toward one party or the other. In a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/opinion/midterms-independents-swing-voters-.html?action=click&amp;module=Opinion&amp;pgtype=Homepage"><em>New York Times</em> op-ed</a> yesterday, political scientists Samara Klar and Yanna Krupnikov estimate that about 36 percent of independents lean toward the Democrats and 42 percent toward the Republicans, while the remaining “pure” independents pay little attention to politics and vote infrequently.</p>
<p>Like independent voters, independent candidates come from across the political spectrum. Some are to the right of the GOP and some to the left of the Democrats, while others position themselves in the intermediate space between the two major parties or wage personal campaigns promising to be above politics. Even when they lose, they may still have a decisive impact, depending on where they draw their votes and whether they hurt Democrats or Republicans the most.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">This fall, independent candidates may determine the outcome of at least four races for governor.</span> Each case is different. In three states—Maine, Kansas, and Alaska—the independents seem likely to hurt the Democratic candidates and potentially throw the election to the Republicans. In one state, Rhode Island, the effect may go the other way.</p>
<p>The most interesting case is Maine, where voters have tried to prevent independent “spoiler” candidates from determining electoral outcomes after the Trump-like Republican Paul LePage was elected governor in 2010 and then re-elected in 2014. In both races, LePage failed to win a majority, while an independent candidate, Eliot Cutler, split the non-Republican vote with a Democrat.</p>
<p>To try to ensure that elections reflect the will of the majority, Maine voters enacted a system of ranked-choice voting, in which voters rank-order candidates on their ballot. If no candidate has a majority of first-choice votes, there is an instant run-off. The candidate with the least support is dropped, and voters who chose that candidate have their votes transferred to their second-choice candidate. The procedure is repeated until one candidate has a majority. The system allows voters to pick independent and third-party candidates, while still preserving a majoritarian outcome.</p>
<p>But while Maine voters passed ranked-choice voting and indeed reaffirmed it in a second referendum, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that it violates a provision of the state constitution regarding the election of the governor. So although Maine is using ranked-choice in elections for Congress this fall, it is ironically not using that system in the election that provoked its adoption—and, once again, independent candidates for governor may affect the outcome.</p>
<p>According to Jim Melcher, professor of political science at the University of Maine, the state’s voters are ticket-splitters and have repeatedly supported independent candidates. In 1975, the state elected an independent candidate, James Longley, as governor. Longley was a conservative populist, unlike the current senator from Maine, Angus King, who fits into the category of an “intermediate” independent. In another time, King might have been a Rockefeller Republican, but he now caucuses with Senate Democrats. Melcher says that statewide elections in Maine have consistently had strong independent candidates since the early 1990s.</p>
<p>In this year’s gubernatorial race, the Democratic candidate, Attorney General Janet Mills, faces Lieutenant Governor Shawn Moody, who is following along in the footsteps of LePage, though he is less inflammatory. Two independents, State Treasurer Terri Hayes and economic consultant Alan Caron, are also running. Both are examples of intermediate independents, but they’re closer to Mills than to Moody on the major issues. One of the big questions concerns the expansion of Medicaid that the state’s voters overwhelmingly approved but LePage has refused to carry out.</p>
<p>Hayes, in fact, used to be the Democrats’ assistant minority leader in Maine’s House of Representatives, though she was chosen as state treasurer primarily with Republican support. She’s running as a “clean elections” candidate, using the funds provided under Maine’s public finance law.</p>
<p>The Maine governor’s race hasn’t had much polling. In early August, a <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/docs/Suffolk_Maine_Senate_Aug_7th_2018.pdf">Suffolk University poll</a> found Mills and Moody in a dead heat at 39 percent each, with Hayes and Caron together drawing about 7 percent, and 15 percent undecided. Hayes has also released results from <a href="https://twitter.com/HayesForMaine/status/1049762983826591746">a late September poll</a> paid for by her campaign showing Mills at 41 percent, Moody at 33 percent, and her own support at 10 percent. In a tight race that may well have a low turnout, Hayes and Caron could play the same role that Cutler did in the two previous elections, handing the governor’s chair to the Republicans.</p>
<p>In Kansas, like Maine, the gubernatorial race is for an open seat after a period of Republican extremism that has increased the chances of a Democratic victory—if it weren’t for an independent candidate. Under Republican Governor Sam Brownback, Kansas cut taxes sharply, precipitating a fiscal crisis and radical retrenchment in funding for schools and other services. This year, in keeping with that radicalism, the Republican nominee is the right-wing firebrand Kris Kobach. Meanwhile, the Democrats have nominated State Senator Laura Kelly, a moderate who has collected endorsements from prominent Kansas Republicans, including former Governor Bill Graves and former U.S. Senator Nancy Kassebaum. Kansas is a pick-up opportunity for Democrats only because the Republican Party in the state has moved so far to the right that it has alienated many of its own traditional supporters.</p>
<p>But independent candidate Greg Orman may throw a wrench in that effort. Orman, who made his money in private equity, is running a self-financed campaign in Kansas for the second time. Four years ago, when he ran for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Pat Roberts, the Democratic candidate was in such a weak position that he withdrew to give Orman a better shot. Orman wouldn’t say then whether he would caucus with the Democrats or Republicans in the Senate and was unwilling to take positions on key issues. Although polls had suggested he could win the Senate race, Roberts trounced Orman on Election Day, in part because Republicans had a strong get-out-the-vote effort that an independent candidate with nebulous views could not match.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Orman this year looks like he’s playing the role of a classic spoiler. </span>The polls show a tight race between Kobach and Kelly. According to a <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/docs/PPP_Kansas_September_2018.pdf">Public Policy Polling survey</a> from mid-September, Kobach is at 39 percent, Kelly at 38 percent, and Orman at 9 percent. </p>
<p>Alaska, the third state where Republicans are benefiting from a split between an independent and a Democrat, is a special case because the independent candidate is the incumbent governor, Bill Walker. After losing the Republican gubernatorial primary in 2010 to Sean Parnell, who went on to win the governor’s race, Walker teamed up in 2014 on a successful independent ticket with the Democratic nominee Byron Mallott, an Alaska native leader who agreed to run as Walker’s lieutenant governor. This year the governor’s race was shaping up as a three-way race with Walker running for re-election against the Republican Mike Dunleavy and Democrat Mark Begich, a former U.S. senator. With Walker and Begich splitting the non-Republican vote, Dunleavy has been favored to win.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://www.thestate.com/news/nation-world/national/article220146000.html">the whole race was shaken up this week</a> when Mallott resigned as lieutenant governor as a result of what Walker characterized as an “inappropriate overture to a woman.” At the time, Walker and Begich were in talks to resolve the issues between them. Whether they can overcome their differences and join forces against the Republican Dunleavy isn’t clear.</p>
<p>Independent candidacies, of course, don’t always hurt Democrats. In Rhode Island, the incumbent Democratic Governor Gina Raimondo has had low approval ratings and fended off a challenge from a progressive in the Democratic primary. She faces Republican Allan Fung but appears to be benefiting from a Trumpian independent candidate, Joe Trillo, who has generally been pulling about 7 percent in polls, though <a href="http://www.golocalprov.com/politics/golocalprov-harvards-della-volpe-poll-governors-race-nearly-a-dead-heat">one survey in October</a> showed him with 17 percent. Raimondo may well be able to win with only a plurality of around 45 percent.</p>
<p>If other states follow Maine and adopt ranked-choice voting—and if Maine itself is able to overcome the obstacle preventing the use of ranked-choice in gubernatorial elections—independent candidates wouldn’t be the spoilers and wild cards they are now. But in the current system, the practical effect of independent candidates is often to undermine the purposes many of their supporters want to achieve. There are two ways to deal with this reality. One is the long road of electoral reform, the ideal solution. The other is for independents to face up to the real-world consequences of their candidacies and their votes. If you're running a hopeless campaign that will take down the candidate whose views are closest to yours, whose work are you really doing?</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 18 Oct 2018 09:00:35 +0000231318 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrIs Brazil about to Have Its Last Democratic Election?https://prospect.org/article/brazil-about-have-its-last-democratic-election
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_18248704879300.jpg?itok=UEkiFPkx" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Eraldo Peres</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro greets supporters during a campaign rally in Brasilia's Ceilandia neighborhood.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">A</span> founding election, according to studies of democratization, is the crucial first election after the end of an authoritarian regime. So what shall we call the opposite—elections where the voters decide whether they will put an end to democracy and turn to authoritarianism? A “shutdown election” might be an apt term.</p>
<p>Brazil is having a shutdown election on October 28, the second round of the presidential race between the candidate of the far right, Jair Bolsonaro, who received 46 percent of the vote in the first round, and the candidate of the left-wing Workers’ Party, Fernando Haddad, who received 28 percent. Most observers consider it nearly certain that Bolsonaro will receive the additional support he needs to take power.</p>
<p>Bolsonaro, a congressman and former army captain, is not just a “populist conservative,” as some news reports characterize him. “Fascist” seems like an entirely accurate description. He has called for killing political opponents, praised the dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, and said that he would not accept the results of this election if he is not the winner and that the army might support him. To deal with Brazil’s rampant crime, he favors giving the police carte blanche to hunt down and kill whomever they suspect. He has referred to indigenous peoples as “parasites,” and is open in his contempt for Afro-Brazilians and gays. He famously said to a woman also serving in the Brazilian Congress, “I wouldn’t rape you because you do not deserve it.” </p>
<p>Even in liberal democracies that have long seemed stable, victories by right-wing antisystem parties are no longer unthinkable. But Bolsonaro and his party are especially dangerous because of their threats of violence against their political opponents and marginalized groups. Bolsonaro is more like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines than most of the right-wing European populist leaders. </p>
<p>The danger in Brazil also arises from the weakness of the party defending democracy in the run-off election. In the face of an antisystem challenge, democratic forces have the best chance if they can unify their supporters behind one party, as Emmanuel Macron was able to do in defeating Marine Le Pen and the National Front in the French elections in 2017.</p>
<p>In Brazil, however, the Workers’ Party does not appear capable of leading a coalition of democratic forces. Brazil did make substantial social and economic progress after the Workers’ Party took office in 2003 under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But by the end of its tenure in August 2016, the party had become deeply implicated in both the endemic corruption of the country and the economic reverses it had suffered. The mainstream parties descended into open warfare with the impeachment of Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff; corruption investigations ensnared a majority of the Congress and led to the jailing of Lula himself. Brazil became polarized between those who support the Workers’ Party and those who oppose it, and Bolsonaro has now effectively made himself the leader of those who oppose it. </p>
<p>Under Lula and Rousseff, the government did enact a series of anti-corruption reforms, which transformed the judiciary and made possible the investigations that boomeranged on the party. Lula signed the legislation that barred him from running for the presidency this year, when he led in early polls. Whether he would have sustained that lead is not clear. In a Senate race, Rousseff also led in polls but ended up coming in fourth.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">If there is a similarity between Bolsonaro and Donald Trump, it is the path they have followed from political outsiders to dominance of the right and a sudden and unexpected surge in electoral support.</span> Bolsonaro has a base in the Pentecostal churches and agribusiness that he has extended to include surprising numbers among the poor who might be expected to be entirely behind the Workers’ Party. </p>
<p>Matthew Rich, a post-doctoral researcher at the Centro de Estudos da Metrópole in São Paulo, <a href="https://mattyrichy.wordpress.com/2018/10/07/understanding-bolsonarismo-popular/">writes that “the key to understanding ‘Bolsonarismo popular’</a> revolves around these everyday stresses of life” for people struggling to get by:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">Their lives are hard and they believe they are doing the right thing. Then they look around themselves and see those they believe are undeserving—“lazy” [welfare] recipients and “bandidos” and it makes them angry. They ask, why are they suffering when these people are not?</p>
<p>This is exactly the same argument that observers have made about the shift to the right in the white working class in the United States.</p>
<p>Assuming Bolsonaro wins, the great question will be whether Brazil’s democratic political institutions, including an independent judiciary, can survive. The record in other countries that have seen right-wing “populist” parties take power is not encouraging. Soon enough their leaders set about gaining control of the judiciary, tax and regulatory authorities, and other agencies and reining in the media and independent organizations in civil society. </p>
<p>This seems the probable outcome in Brazil too. The formalities of elections may remain, but the opposition will have no real chance once Bolsonaro is in power. That’s what a shutdown election is ultimately about, even if the voters don’t recognize that when they cast their votes for an authoritarian, they are resigning from their own role as the ultimate source of authority in a republic. </p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:40:34 +0000231279 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrThe Only Good to Come of the Kavanaugh Fighthttps://prospect.org/article/only-good-come-kavanaugh-fight
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_18269200848236.jpg?itok=A9B8jPua" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court has ended with a double defeat for Democrats. Not only will he sit on the Court; the confirmation battle has also roused Republicans for the November election and helped close the “enthusiasm gap” that existed earlier this year.</p>
<p>That’s not to say Democrats should have ducked this fight. There’s no way to win in politics or in anything else if you give up in advance. And the Kavanaugh battle may bring about one good result, though it’s nothing to cheer about.</p>
<p>Many Americans have an out-of-date view of the Supreme Court as a bulwark of liberalism. In fact, Republican presidents have made 15 out of the last 19 Supreme Court appointments, and the rulings of the most recently appointed justices have increasingly followed partisan lines. The decisions about same-sex marriage and a few other highly publicized cases have even misled many liberals and progressives into thinking the Court is more liberal than it is. Now that Kavanaugh is replacing Anthony Kennedy, they should be disabused of that illusion.</p>
<p>In his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh unmasked himself as a raw partisan, consistent with his long career as a Republican operative. As retired Justice John Paul Stevens later said, Kavanaugh’s partisanship should have disqualified him from a seat on the Court. But the entire episode—what Kavanaugh said, the disrespect he showed the Democratic senators, and the Republicans’ decision to ignore that naked partisanship—will have a healthy effect in clarifying that the Supreme Court is going to become an even more partisan, right-wing institution than it has been.</p>
<p>During the confirmation battle, many people cited Kavanaugh’s naked partisanship as a reason for the Senate not to confirm him. For example, Benjamin Wittes, the conservative editor-in-chief of Lawfare, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/why-i-wouldnt-confirm-brett-kavanaugh/571936/">wrote in <em>The Atlantic</em></a>:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">Can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a reasonable pro-choice woman would feel like her position could get a fair shake before a Justice Kavanaugh? Can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a reasonable Democrat, or a reasonable liberal of any kind, would after that performance consider him a fair arbiter in, say, a case about partisan gerrymandering, voter identification, or anything else with a strong partisan valence? </p>
<p>What was a reason not to confirm Kavanaugh has now become a basis for questioning the legitimacy of the Court’s future decisions.</p>
<p>We already had one justice, Neil Gorsuch, occupying a seat as a result of Senate Republicans’ determination to ignore long-standing norms about Court appointments when they refused to consider Merrick Garland. Now we have two such justices whom Democrats are not bound to respect.</p>
<p>Many observers have been wringing their hands about the lost legitimacy of the Court in the wake of the Kavanaugh fight. But let us be clear about the responsibility for that lost legitimacy. Republicans made the choice of putting aside any concerns about judicial impartiality. If the Court’s right-wing decisions now have less legitimacy, they will have brought that result upon themselves—and let us at least be thankful for that naked show of partisan power. No one can pretend the Court’s majority is now anything but an extension of the Republican Party; at best, it will hold back from being an extension of Trumpified Republicanism.</p>
<p>The advocates of liberal causes have long relied excessively on the courts and on litigation as a way to achieve advances in rights to equality. That era, dating back to the Warren Court, did see important victories, but same-sex marriage may well be the last one. <span class="pullquote-right">With Kavanaugh on the Court, we should all be clear that liberals and progressives have no way forward except by winning electoral majorities.</span> Going to court will be mostly only a defensive move, and the hope of winning even in those cases will be increasingly slim. </p>
<p>Somewhere down the road, assuming Democrats ever do regain control of both Congress and the presidency, they are going to confront a Supreme Court that threatens to block major liberal initiatives. As I wrote last month (“<a href="http://prospect.org/article/big-choice-about-supreme-court-democrats-will-face">The Big Choice about the Supreme Court Democrats Will Face</a>”), Democrats will probably have to consider a two-track approach at that point. To deal with the immediate threat of a judicial veto over their entire program, they will need to put on the table the option that the Constitution leaves open: enlarging the Court and appointing new justices, as Republicans did in the 1860s and as Franklin Roosevelt proposed in the 1930s—hardball strategies that in both cases succeeded in deterring the Court from blocking reforms by the elected branches.</p>
<p>At the same time, Democrats should also seek to negotiate long-term constitutional reforms of the Court, though these would not address the immediate challenge they face. One such reform is to limit Supreme Court justices to a single, 18-year term, with those terms staggered so that an appointment comes up every other year. Winning the presidency would then mean getting two Court nominations per term. Fixed terms for the Court would reduce the tendency toward self-perpetuating majorities that results from justices deciding to retire only when a president of their own party is in office. </p>
<p>During this past week's television discussions about the Kavanaugh confirmation, I heard more than one liberal commentator say that there should be an asterisk after future five-to-four Supreme Court rulings in which Kavanaugh provides the deciding vote. </p>
<p>Adding an asterisk to those rulings is the least of what we will need to do. The immediate imperative for Democrats is to build electoral majorities to do through legislation what can no longer be done through litigation. And if they succeed in winning control of the elected branches, they will probably need to take on the Court directly, as the forces of reform found it necessary to do during Reconstruction and the New Deal. The Republicans’ breach of norms will have left Democrats no choice.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 05 Oct 2018 21:16:54 +0000231241 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrCan a Blue Wave Save America?https://prospect.org/article/can-blue-wave-save-america
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/istock-838403132.jpg?itok=vI_Pcmi7" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">mmac72/Getty</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><em>This article appears in the Fall 2018 issue of </em>The American Prospect <em>magazine. <a href="http://www.prospect.org/subscribe">Subscribe here</a>. </em></p>
<p><span class="dropcap">E</span>lections are a democracy’s error-correction system, and the United States has never needed an error-correcting midterm election more than it does this fall.</p>
<p>The midterms come at an hour of exceptional danger to the republic from unfit and unstable presidential leadership. They come at a time when the party in control of all branches of the federal government has reinforced long-term trends toward economic inequality and reversed steps the government had taken to slow global warming. They come amid the incitement of racial division and hatred of immigrants, the weakening of the nation’s alliances, the demonization of the press, and flagrant lies and corruption at the highest levels of government.</p>
<p>In short, the midterms could not come a moment too soon.</p>
<p>If America is to pull back from the course it is now on, that change has to start with the voters. But this fall’s election will not be a simple and straightforward referendum. As a result of the structural disadvantages that Democrats face in the battle for Congress, they may not get a majority of seats even if they win a majority of votes. And if they fall short of gaining control, Donald Trump will take it not just as a victory but as a vindication.</p>
<p>Trump’s famous line during the 2016 campaign, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” has had a practical correlate during his presidency. He has openly abused the powers and privileges of office, yet the Republican Congress has not held him accountable in any respect.</p>
<p>Some restraint on Trump has come from within the administration, or so we have been reassured. The anonymous “senior official” who wrote the notorious op-ed published on September 5 in <em>The New York Times</em> claims that “many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.” Like the sources for Bob Woodward’s book Fear, the op-ed writer describes an amoral, impulsive president, uninterested in facts, making “half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions” that his subordinates “walk back.” But this internal sabotage is both wholly undemocratic and wholly unreliable; it will hold back Trump only until he ferrets out the “resistance” within his administration and no longer feels restrained by circumstances.</p>
<p>That is another potential effect of the midterm election: It may unleash Trump. Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley have suggested the president wait until the midterms are over to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom he has been badgering for months for acting disloyally and recusing himself from the Russia investigation. One of Trump’s most astonishing tweets was his attack on Sessions on September 3 for allowing the Justice Department to prosecute two Republican congressmen for corruption, thereby putting “two easy wins” in doubt. The plain implication was that a loyal attorney general would have put partisanship above the law, and that is exactly what Trump will want of a successor to Sessions.</p>
<p>The period right after the election, with a lame-duck Congress, may be the moment of greatest danger, when Trump feels least under restraint in using the powers available to him, such as executive pardons. The big question will be how Robert Mueller’s investigation comes to an end and whether Trump tries after the election to put the Justice Department under his thumb and bend law enforcement to his corrupt purposes. Even a Mueller report with clear findings of obstruction of justice and other crimes will not necessarily lead to any move to hold Trump accountable as long as Congress remains in Republican hands. And that is where it may remain—even with a blue wave, unless it is an unusually big one.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>AS CHILDREN IN SCHOOL,</strong> we learned that in a democracy, the majority wins. If only that were true in America today. After the midterm election, the federal government could have a perfect trifecta of minority rule: a Republican majority of the House of Representatives, a Republican Senate majority, and a Republican president—all elected with a minority of the popular vote.</p>
<p>Forecasts of the race for the House agree that winning a simple majority of the popular vote nationally will not be enough for the Democrats. The clustering of Democratic votes in metropolitan areas and Republican gerrymandering after the 2010 census have put Democrats at a sharp disadvantage. According to FiveThirtyEight’s model, Democrats need a 5.5 percentage edge over the Republicans in the popular vote to be favored to win the House. According to an estimate by Sam Wang, Ben Williams, and Rick Ober in this issue, Republicans could lose the popular vote for the House by as much as six percentage points and still have an equal chance of retaining control. Under normal circumstances, that kind of margin would probably result in a wave election. Republicans picked up 54 seats and gained control in 1994 when they won the popular vote for the House by seven points; they picked up 63 seats and won control again in 2010 with a seven-point margin. But in 2018, a seven-point margin for Democrats might still leave them short of the 23 seats they need. If they do win control, their margin in seats is likely to be smaller than it would be in a typical wave election.</p>
<p>The Senate poses an even steeper challenge for Democrats. While Republicans are defending only nine seats in November, the Democrats are defending 26, and ten of those are in states that Trump won two years ago. The source of the problem for Democrats is not only this year’s Senate map. With its overrepresentation of rural, low-population states, the Senate is necessarily a challenge for a party whose voters are now even more disproportionately urban than they used to be. Paul Waldman, a senior writer for the <em>Prospect</em> and a <em>Washington Post</em> columnist, has calculated that the current Democratic members of the Senate collectively received 15 million more votes than the Republican members. In the new Senate, Republicans may well retain their majority despite winning fewer votes overall.</p>
<p>The net result of all these trends, as congressional analyst David Wasserman has written, is that “the pro-GOP biases in both chambers are at historic highs.” That does not mean Republicans are certain to retain control (as of mid-September, the forecasts indicate Democrats are favored for the House, though not the Senate). <span class="pullquote-right">The point is that because of the formidable advantages Republicans enjoy, they could lose the popular vote by a significant margin yet still keep control</span>, protecting Trump from accountability and enabling him to fire Sessions, end the Mueller probe, and more deeply politicize Justice and other departments.</p>
<p>The danger is also that the election may leave the Republican Party even more Trumpified than it is now. Before the primaries, a number of Republicans critical of Trump, most prominently Senators Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, decided not to run for re-election. Trump then flexed his power in primary contests, successfully backing candidates to his liking. So, unless they lose the election, congressional Republicans seem even less likely to oppose him in 2019 than before. They may also conclude that the policies they have enacted are a success. Although the public has never approved of the tax legislation they passed last year, Republican donors have rewarded the party by returning a portion of their gains in the form of millions of dollars in campaign money. If Republicans survive the midterms, they will have every political incentive to continue along the same path, enacting legislation benefiting corporations and the rich regardless of its popular support—minority rule redoubled.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>THOSE ARE THE STAKES</strong> and the risks in November. But, as grim as those possibilities are, there are also encouraging developments for Democrats that ought to boost their chances and their spirits as they look not just to 2018 but to 2020 and beyond.</p>
<p>The Democratic Party is more unified than is generally appreciated. At the grassroots level, the resistance groups have brought together liberals, progressives, and many people with less-defined positions who are appalled by Trump. Although the primaries this year saw some hard-fought contests, they haven’t left behind the bitterness of the 2016 Clinton-Sanders fight. Progressive insurgents won a few notable victories mainly in urban districts long represented by liberals, but this was not the pattern overall. The candidates who emerged from the statewide primaries for the U.S. Senate and governor are overwhelmingly mainstream liberals who have moved a step to the left compared with where their counterparts were a decade or two ago (for example, in their support of a $15 minimum wage). The party is fielding more socially conservative candidates in more conservative states, but it is a testimony to Democrats’ increased unity that instead of running away from the Affordable Care Act, even these moderates like Joe Manchin of West Virginia are campaigning on health-care reform. To be sure, there are real differences of both substance and strategy in the party, yet those differences have not been the source of debilitating feuds. Trump, it turns out, has been a uniter—of Democrats.</p>
<p>In addition, the early election surveys indicate that Democrats are at least as likely as Republicans to turn out to vote in November. In midterm elections, Democrats have tended to suffer from a gap in turnout because of their dependence on young, minority, and low-income voters who show up more irregularly at the polls. Two developments, however, may erase that gap this year. One is the shift of better-educated suburban voters to the Democrats, while Republicans are becoming more dependent on less-educated, working-class votes. The other is the greater intensity of conviction and grassroots activism among Democrats.</p>
<p>Increased Democratic turnout in 2018 could have repercussions extending into the next decade. It was a sharp decline in Democratic turnout in 2010 that enabled Republicans to win control of statehouses across the country that year and then gerrymander congressional and state legislative districts. As Sam Wang and his co-authors argue, voters this fall have the opportunity to “untilt” each one of the eight states with the most egregious partisan gerrymanders. Democrats are lucky that Trump has energized their voters at so crucial a moment.</p>
<p>No midterm election can undo all the damage that Trump has done and is likely to do as president. A change in Congress and the states, however, could at least restore some of the checks on the misuse of power that our constitutional system expects and Republicans have failed to provide. It’s a hard road that Democrats face, and it’s the only one there is. </p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 01 Oct 2018 09:00:00 +0000231144 at https://prospect.orgPaul StarrMichael Bloomberg and the Case of the Homeless Republicans https://prospect.org/article/michael-bloomberg-and-case-homeless-republicans
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="embed">
<div class="image image-large">
<div class="field-image"><img src="https://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ap_17177681942088.jpg?itok=nN-nfOva" alt="" title="" /></div>
<div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Lynne Sladky</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<p>Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks at the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Miami Beach, Florida.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>merica’s homeless have lately been joined by a new group: wealthy, moderate Republicans whose home has been seized by Donald Trump after they were long made to feel unwelcome in their old neighborhood. Democrats, always sympathetic to the displaced, now face a choice about whether to take in this new population of the uprooted and forlorn.</p>
<p>No one better embodies the homeless Republicans than Michael Bloomberg, who has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/us/politics/bloomberg-president-2020-democrat.html">recently been reported</a> as mulling a race for president as a Democrat. According to <em>Forbes</em>, Bloomberg is the tenth richest person in the world, with a net worth of $53 billion, and he is spending $80 million of it to support Democratic candidates for the House this year. Democrats are certainly glad to have that financial support.</p>
<p>They are also glad to have the support of the reclusive hedge fund manager Seth Klarman (net worth, $1.5 billion), who after being one of the Republicans’ biggest donors has shifted his contributions to Democrats in 2018. In a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/15/opinion/sunday/seth-klarman-donations-trump-democrats.html">rare interview</a>, Klarman told Bari Weiss of <em>The New York Times </em>that he is spending more on political campaigns than he ever has: “We need to turn the House and Senate as a check on Donald Trump and his runaway presidency.”</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Bloomberg and Klarman are only the most conspicuous examples of a large group of donors who hold liberal views on social issues along with more conservative positions on economics.</span> It is not a new experience for Democrats to be torn between appealing to contributors with those preferences and appealing to working-class voters on a more populist basis. The influx of money into the Democratic Party from the center-right is only going to heighten those tensions. </p>
<p>That conflict, moreover, is symptomatic of another battle that will play out in the Democratic Party in the next two years: whether to try to capture the center abandoned by the Republicans or to move left. A few victories in this year’s primaries for the House by progressives may have given the impression that the party is moving left. But nearly all the Democrats who have won the primaries for governor and senator—the major statewide races—have been mainstream liberals who are sticking closer to the center.</p>
<p>That’s one reason for not dismissing Bloomberg’s potential support in the presidential primaries in 2020. Bloomberg may seem out of sync with the party because of his relation to Wall Street and his stop-and-frisk policing policies as mayor of New York, but he has been a leader on climate change, gun control, reproductive rights, and public health. There is a significant constituency of Democratic voters who will be drawn to him on the basis of those issues. </p>
<p>Many states, furthermore, have open primaries that allow voters to choose which party to vote in. If the outcome in the Republican Party is a fait accompli, moderate Republicans as well as independents could pour into the Democratic primaries and vote for Bloomberg. While a large number of candidates compete for the same progressive voters, Bloomberg could be alone in the center. The fragmentation of the Democratic field may prevent any candidate from emerging from the primaries with a majority of pledged delegates. So even if he fails to win the nomination, Bloomberg might win enough delegates to be a kingmaker.</p>
<p>At age 78 in 2020, Bloomberg will have obvious limitations as a presidential candidate besides his awkward fit with the Democratic Party, and he may well decide in the end not to run. But, one way or the other, homeless Republicans and their money will pose a challenge for Democrats.</p>
<p>The Democrats’ challenge will be to keep the moderates on board in a common front against Trump and the rightward drift of the Republican Party. Democrats especially have an interest in dissuading wealthy moderates from running as independent candidates or forming a third party that would likely play the role of spoiler. They will want support from voters as well as donors with socially liberal views despite disagreements on economic policy.</p>
<p>But Democrats should not, and generally do not, want their own party to turn into the old Rockefeller wing of the GOP. Moving in that direction would be a political disaster at a time when the party needs to rebuild its support among working-class voters.</p>
<p>Ideally, the old moderate wing of the GOP would recover and give the United States a reasonable center-right party. But because there’s no prospect of that happening anytime soon, the Republican homeless are likely to seek influence in the Democratic Party and try to make a home for themselves there. </p>
<p>“Home,” Robert Frost wrote, “is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Democrats, generous souls that they are, ought to take in homeless Republicans. It’s just that they shouldn’t allow themselves to get taken over.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 20 Sep 2018 09:00:00 +0000231074 at https://prospect.orgPaul Starr